Good Eggs

With Caspian beluga nearing extinction, foodies are looking to North American caviar. James Chatto tests the waters.

I saw something shocking the other night at Jamie Kennedy’s eponymous restaurant in Toronto. There was the chef, as renowned for his environmental activism as for his cooking, spooning sturgeon caviar onto blinis. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s Canadian caviar – wild Abitibi sturgeon from Quebec. It’s sustainable. You can eat it with a clear conscience.” And with total pleasure: The texture and rich, tangy flavour were everything a caviar lover craves. Which is just as well, because in the coming years this could be the only sturgeon caviar most of us will ever see.

Roe from the Caspian Sea is simply no longer an option. The beluga sturgeon is so close to extinction, it’s no longer a legal catch, and stocks of sevruga and osetra have never been so low. Riddled with organized and disorganized crime and stricken by pollution from the oil industry, fisheries in Russia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan have been in turmoil since the USSR fell. Five years ago, one could find illegal caviar in north Toronto’s more obscure Russian delis, spooned from a Tupperware tub in the fridge and sold at a bargain price. Flight attendants with LOT Polish Airlines were smugglings it in, until they were caught and jailed. These days, almost all Russian caviar goes to Moscow’s new rich, though very reputable suppliers with old connections can still acquire some that isn’t poached, pasteurized., frozen mislabeled or counterfeit. Harrods in London will sell you 30 grams of bona fide osetra for about $100.

Iranian caviar, rigorously controlled by the government in Tehran, is a much more reliable product, though increasingly scarce and expensive. When this year’s quota dropped from 75 to 40 tonnes, prices soared. Toronto’s gourmet store Pusateri’s sells only Iranian, but manager John Mastroianni sees the future as grim. “The shipment North America received in October may be the last one for years,” he predicts, “perhaps until 2010. CITES, the UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species that controls the industry, has imposed a moratorium on international trade in all Caspian Sea caviar. Yes, we’ll likely have some this Christmas – probably at double last year’s price, or higher. After that, it’s going to get interesting.” Does that mean Pusateri’s will start selling U.S. or Canadian caviar? “Not a chance,” say Mastroianni. “It’s not comparable. The difference is night and day.”

It’s an extreme opinion disputed by many. For years, top American chefs like Charlie Trotter and Rick Moonen have publicly endorsed the quality of farmed U.S. sturgeon caviar and served it in their restaurants. I remember tasting several versions around the millennium and found the quality inconsistent. Some were dead ringers for Caspian osetra; some were mushy and had a curious grassy note in the flavour. These days, consistency (in both senses of the word) is much improved. The difficulty in Canada is finding it.

The two big American producers – Tsar Nicoulai and Stolt (which sells under the Sterling brand) – charge around $74 for an ounce (28 grams) of the finest Californian osetra, but they won’t ship it to Canada. Nor will anyone else in the States. They don’t find it worth their while to embark on the lengthy and labyrinthine process of applying for a CITES export permit. So the easiest way to simple the U.S. product is to fetch it yourself – individual travelers can usually safely bring 250 grams across the border.

What about Canadian Sturgeon caviar? In the late 1800’s, Ontario’s Lake of the Woods was overflowing with sturgeon, and bars set out jars of it as a free snack with beer. The annual harvest of caviar was around 800,000 kilos, but overfishing and paper mill pollution took a terrible toll. By 1915, the sturgeon industry had collapsed. Canada cleaned up its act in the 1970’s, and caviar from Rainy River and Lake Abitibi sometimes finds its way into stores and restaurants. I found a jar of wild Abitibi sturgeon caviar at Caviar Direct in Toronto’s St. Lawrence Market - $130 grams for $299, half the price of Caspian osetra. It was delicious: the eggs properly firm, sticky rather than mushy, with creamy depths of flavour. The saltiness was a tad sharper and more obtrusive than Russian or Iranian caviar’s, but it would be very hard to tell the difference unless you tasted them side by side.

The problem with Canadian Caviar is the small quantity available. Sturgeon farming in this country got started only in the 1990’s, and the fish don’t mature for over a decade. Within five years, we may well start seeing it more regularly in fishmonger and gourmet stores but until then dealers earmark the little available for our restaurants.

All things considered, this may be the worst time in the history of civilization to go looking for sturgeon caviar – which casts us back onto other species. Paddlefish is a U.S. cousin to the sturgeon. A 28 gram tin of its caviar at Pisces Gourmet in Toronto sells for $65. It was as rich as sturgeon and had the requisite salty tang, but the eggs were softer, and there was a faint trace of muddiness in the aftertaste. Different but delicious, crunchy, apricot-coloured whitefish roe and darker orange arctic char caviar are righteous Canadian alternatives, and there’s always salmon caviar (chum number one is the best) when you need big, intensely flavourful eggs that pop between your tongue and the roof of your mouth. A slippery Spanish product called Avruga tries to approach the complexity of caviar by smoking herring roe and adding lemon juice, thickeners, and squid ink for colour. Yummy and useful for recipes, it belongs in a different league.

Lean years lie ahead for caviar lovers. Morally responsible people, who wouldn’t buy Caspian even if they could, leave their names on waiting lists at stores like Caviar Direct, urge friends to bring back what they can from the United States and wait anxiously for Canadian farms to begin serious production. Patient, prehistoric, unaware of the attention of the world, the sturgeon will not be hurried.

FASHION
Winter 2006