Europe is with Roe

BERLINGSKE TIDENDE’s Sunday supplement M/S, November 21, 2004 By Kim Flyvbjerg

Europe is with Roe:

The Russians have ruined the market for themselves, the Iranians maintain the style as the world’s most distin-guished, but the future for caviare is in Europe. While wild sturgeon is threatened in the Caspian Sea, European sturgeon farms have produced a brilliant alternative in later years. M/S has visited one of them near Bordeaux.

Small evil eyes, a V-shaped snout with thick whiskers, hanging down over the mouth, and a dorsal fin, which in fits baskes from side to side and creates a circular movement around two young Frenchmen in wet suits. The sturgeon looks like a shark. Inside as well, since the sturgeon, like the shark, has no bones, but a skeleton of cartilage. The famous Beluga sturgeon from the Caspian Sea may become more than 100 years of age, reach a length of nine meters and weigh upwards of one and half tonnes. In France the farmed Baerii sturgeons seldom reach an age of more than ten years and a weight of eight to fifteen kilos.. Yet it is a fish capable of throwing a man to the floor, if one hasn’t the right grip. The young Frenchmen stand in matte, greenish water to the waist.When they lift the smooth, black-grey torpedoes out of the water, the fish writhe and slam the wet suits. We are at a sturgeon farm an hour’s drive from Bordeaux.The area is flat and in size like 3-4 football fields. The sky is gray, the grass dark green and wet. It is late September, and in the near distance a flock of gulls and a single grey heron fly around. The thought that 180 tonnes of stur-geon swim in the low water basins, almost loads theair with electricity, as if we were underneath crackling pylons. The sturgeons are eased up on land, brought under a ceiling of tarpaulin, where a group of elder men takes over. With a scanner some of them search the fish, as they were a pregnant woman, while others dutifully notetheir results in notebooks. They note their sex, and the males are sorted out – most are sent to slaughter, otherssold to put & take, while a few are saved for further rearing. The females are discovered by the scanner, which sends small pin pricks up on a black and white monitor. Those are the pin pricks it is all about. The sought-after roe, which, like nothing else has become synonymous withold European gastronomic decadence. Not coloured lump-sucker roe. Not avruga, which might sound authentic, but is simply herring meat rolled into small balls and coloured black. Not caviare, genuine caviare.

THE COMPANY IS NAMED STURGEON and the product Baerii/Caviare de France. It is imported by Rossini Caviar, Scandinavia’s largest importer of genuine caviare with a yearly sale on the right side of 200 kiloes in Denmark alone. Managing director Jacob Marsing-Rossini has chosento completely bypass the earlier, so prestigious Russian caviare because of its quality variations. He finds that that the French caviare is an excellent alternative to Iranian caviare – the price of which has nearly doubled this year. He offers both types, but at several blind testings it has been ascertained that even experts find it difficult to distin-guish between French farmed caviare and Iranian caviare from wild sturgeons in the Caspian Sea. The sturgeon farm lies in St. Fort sur Gironde. The Gironde river runs through this area on its way from Bordeaux to the Atlantic ocean, or perhaps it is the other way round. In olden days there were wild sturgeons in the river, and a production of French caviare started up at the beginning of the 19th century. Production stopped after the Second World War as a consequence of changes in the environment and over-fishing, and in 1980 the last sturgeon was caught in the river. Even if the Baerii sturgeon so far has made it on this planet in 300 million years and is doing well on the farms in France – in spite of the fact that it stems from the cold Siberia – yes, most do not believe that setting it out in the Gironde again will be successful and create a new wild stock. However, it stands to reason that caviare is a firmly established part of French gastronomy. The French eat 15% of the world production, making them the world’s big-gest purchaser. The company Sturgeon is considered one of Europe’s biggest producers, but there are also farming in a.o. Italy, Germany and Bulgaria. The farm in St. Fort sur Gironde is one of Sturgeons three farms.

PRESENT ON THIS DAY is also the managing director, an English farmer by the name of Allan Jones. A large graying man in his fifties, who undoubtedly would be a Range Rover, were he a car. As a young man he wrote a doctoral dissertation about farming of turbot and was one of the pioneers in this field together with farming of bass. But when, as director of the international fishing company, Stolt Sea Farm, he was asked to leave France for a position in Spain, the love of La France was too big. He saw how the amount of wild caviare was falling because of over- fish-ing in the Caspian Sea and he envisaged a market. So then he went solo and teamed up with a French family in 1995. Together they invested in closed trout farms and centers for hatching and rearing of infant fish fry and at the same took over a large stock of sturgeons at about 100 tonnes. They were reared for the purpose of selling the meat, but this Allan Jones was not interested in. The three to four year old fish halved the waiting time until he could supply caviare, so that he need not farm fish for seven to eight years before money came into the till. In 1999 Sturgeon sent their first two tonnes to the trade, and this year they will reach seven and a half tonnes; the aim is fifteen tonnes within a few years. Allan Jones also tries to sell the meat of the sturgeons – according to Gastronomical Encyclopedia it is well suited for smoking – but he thinks that it might also have a potential as fresh meat sold at fishmongers. It can be treated as calves meat, and it is in fact fish of this type that is so very popular with Danish fishmongers, i.e. fish without bones, and which does not taste too much of fish, similar to tuna, marlin, you name it.

NOT RAR FROM THE STURGEON FARM lies the slaughter house.It isn’t a particularly glamorous place. From the outside it looks like a place, where one could just as well weld transistors or cast wash basins. But in truth one produces caviare at 1000 Euro the kilo The sturgeon is slaughtered in the spring and the fall. The living fish are transported in basins from the farm to the slaughterhouse. Here they are hung on a meat hook through the head on a railing in a sterile room with red and blue plastic buckets and curtains of thick transparent plastic. Dressed in overalls with blue hairnets and paper napkins on the mouth, the slaughteres take down the stur-geons one by one and armed with thin, sharp knives and steelmesh gloves they slap the fish onto a table ofstainless steel, hose it down, and make a cut in the bellyfrom the head towards the tail. There is plenty of black roe in the belly of the fish, and together with buttery pla-centa about one and a half kilo of caviare is dumped into a plastic bowl. There never was anything romantic about slaughter. In an adjoining room a woman registers every fish, so thateach tin can be traced to the individual fish. With pinchers and ruler she controls that the eggs have the required minimum size which is 2,5 millimeters. In the same rooma young worker strain the roe over a soft sieve to rid the roe of the worst impurity. Another takes care of furthercleansing. And then lie the large roes in plastic bowls on ice and for the first time they remind one of the end result in the small golden tins. If one has ever picked green nuts from a hazel bush and eaten the yet not ripe, white nut, one has a good impres-sion of how clean caviare tastes. But the taste of salt is lacking. Salt is added in the last room, following which the caviare is packed.. After fourteen days in tins, salt and egg combine and the caviare may be eaten. From then on and up to the sell-by date about three months later the caviare gradually becomes stronger, but also more watery as egg and salt merge. In genuine caviarethere are no additives, no pasteurisation, no hokus pokus at all. As in so many ways, the simple is the best.Many also feel that caviare is best enjoyed au natural – an if one has seen the Italian beauty Monica Belluci pose naked in Esquire, only covered by a thin layer of Beluga, one is inclined to just eat it from the tin. Never the less we drive to St. Emilion, where the grapes hang heavy on the vine ready to be harvested the follow-ing week. Not far from the famous Chateau Petrus, in thesandstone built center of St. Emilion, Philippe Etchebesthas prepared a menue of caviare at the Hôtel Le Plaisance. He serves the black grains together with smoked salmon,pink calf, tails of Norway lobster and even cheese. In some of the causes they are the luxurious, but superfluous ad-dition, in the best cases the very special salty taste of the caviare is used to complete the cause. Only the desert is not created with caviare, but there should be no hindrance for completing the meal with the black grains – the gastronomical inventor Heston Blumenthal from the Fat Ducks’ recent combination of white chocolate and caviare has been widely copied throughout the world and is already considered a modern classic.

• CaviareoriginallycomesfromdifferentwildtypesofsturgeonintheCaspianSea,theworld’slargestlake.

• RussiabordersontheSeaandstartedaproductionofcaviareinthe1920ies.AfterthefalloftheSoviet Union the good reputation of Russian caviare was shattered, and to-day 90 % of the production is probably illigal. Iran too borders on the Sea and in 1950 came onto the market. Their caviare is considered the World’s finest.

• Thewildsturgeonisthreatenedbyover-fishing,andfromcertainquartersitissuggestedtocompletely stop fishing for a period. So far there has been a fall in the catch from 400 tonnes in 1950 to 140 tonnes in 2003. This year a catch of 70 tonnes is expected.

• CaviarefromtheCaspianSeacomefromOscietre(95%),AcipenserGueldenstaedti,Sevruga(4,5%), AcipenserStellatusandthealmostunobtainableBeluga(0,5%)fromthestrainHusohuso.

• ThecaviarefromtheFrenchsturgeonfarmsiscalledBaeriiandcomesfromAcipenserBaerii,asturgeon type stemming from Siberia. The French are trying to get permission to also produce Oscietre caviare.

• Cites,whichregulatesandcontrolquotaofcaviare,hasdecidedtoreducetheamountofsturgeontobe caught in the Caspian Sea. Where last year marketing of 80 tonnes was allowed prior to Christmas, this year only30tonnesisfreed.Shilat(theIranianStateAgency)thereforedecidedtoraisepricesbyanaverageof 93%.FrenchBaeriicaviare(caviardeFrance)costsfrom349Dkr./30grammes,andthecheapestIranian, Sevruga, costs from 795 Dkr./30 grammes.

• InDenmarkRossiniCaviarmarketallfourtypes.Readmoreonwww.rossinicaviar.com