The Alchemists The new business of caviar production around the world is about to expand and has become a serious and muchneeded alternative to tradit

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5 The Alchemists The new business of caviar production around the world is about to expand and has become a serious and muchneeded alternative to traditional caviar production. This is good news for the world s gourmets since farmed caviar is not only cheaper but is also often of better quality. For centuries alchemists have tried to find the magic formula for producing gold, but so far without success. Man has, however succeeded in imitating other aspects of Mother Nature when she is in her most generous form. We have found ways to produce some of the most expensive treasures that humans desire, such as diamonds and real truffles, instead of having to try to find them in nature, like a needle in a haystack. These processes are not easy, but they can be done, and the resulting products are of superb quality. Today, to the delight of gourmets, after years of experimenting, experts are able to produce another grand and expensive gastronomic commodity: genuine premium quality sturgeon caviar. Sturgeon farms in France, Germany, the United States and Italy supply good quantities of caviar to high-level restaurants on land, in the air and on the sea, plus of course directly to food lovers around the world. And there is much more to come as new producers enter the market and current players boost existing capacity that is expected to increase the total supply by tenfold within the next few years. Many believe it is high time, because, as many people know, the wild sturgeon is not at all doing well. Overfishing and pollution of its natural spawning routes in the Caspian Sea have led to a dramatic drop in the stock of various sturgeon species including Oscietre and Beluga. The problems began after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when state control virtually disappeared, and fishing in the Caspian and Black Seas came under the rule of the Russian mafia. Things worsened as increasing water pollution, particularly from Russia via the Volga River, destroyed most of the natural spawning routes. The situation became increasingly untenable, and finally in 2006 the UN agency, CITES decided to impose massive fishing restrictions. These have recently been eased slightly, but the small amount of fresh wild caviar, legally available for sale, is three times as expensive as the farmed versions. Moreover, as a buyer you have no assurance that it actually is recently caught. It is a well-known problem that there is fiddling with date stamps in Russia and to a lesser extent Iran, so in reality what seems to be fresh caviar may come from the time before the restrictions were imposed more than a year ago. The allegedly fresh caviar may even be pasteurized to extend its shelf life, but it has a massive effect on the taste, warns managing director Jacob Marsing-Rossini from Scandinavia s largest caviar agency Rossini Caviar, situated in central Copenhagen. He has been in the caviar business for many years, trading both the wild and farmed versions, and knows about all the pitfalls. Overall, his advice to the consumer is to stick to caviar in cans: Do not buy caviar packed in glass jars in which case it is very easy to pasteurise. In contrast, cans do not withstand the pasteurisation heating to 71 degrees, so canned caviar provides a high degree of certainty that the caviar is not pasteurised. Rossini Caviar supplies farmed caviar to Denmark s best restaurants such as The Paul in Tivoli and Søllerød Kro. They recently expanded activities internationally, including in Dubai, where they deliver as much caviar to the worldrenowned Burj al Arab hotel each month, as their largest Scandinavian client gets for a whole year. Gordon Ramsay has also just chosen caviar from Rossini on a private label for his group of restaurants. Generally, the finest restaurants and hotels around the world have in recent years changed direction in favour of farmed caviar. Chefs have realised that farmed caviar has now reached a high and stable quality while the price of the wild Caspian Sea versions has skyrocketed and is even harder to obtain, at least legally. Finally, farmed caviar has a good story to tell, which meets today s consumer demands for sustainable production and consideration for endangered species.

6 One of the pioneers of farmed caviar is Englishman Alan Jones, who is head of the company Caviar et Prestige in Bordeaux. With a partner, he bought trout farms in the Gironde region and established a caviar production on 4 or 5 year-old Baeri sturgeons imported from Siberia. The Baeri species has proved to be capable of adapting to new surroundings, and in 1999 the company introduced its first two tonnes of caviar to the market. Today Caviar et Prestige is one of the world s largest and most recognized manufacturers of genuine caviar of the highest quality, and the production is still primarily based on the Siberian Baeri sturgeon. During the early years of production, Caviar et Prestige and other newly-established sturgeon farms experienced obvious differences in the quality of farmed compared to wild caviar. The farmed version could have an unpleasant taste of mud and the egg membranes were often either too hard or too soft. But years of experimentation and research have gradually improved the products, and today many manufacturers offer a clean-tasting caviar with characteristic butter-like richness and exactly the right pop when the teeth press together on the precious eggs. Many blind tastings have shown that the farmed caviar can easily hold its own against the wild, but when wild caviar is at its best, some still believe that it has a somewhat more complex flavour. The problem however, is that top quality caviar from the Caspian Sea is indeed a rare phenomenon today. In any case, the man-made caviar is more uniform in quality, because manufacturers exert high control over each stage of the production process. The fish get the right feed at the right time; they live in pure water of exactly the right temperature; they are slaughtered at exactly the right time, etc. WORLD S GREATEST. Another of the pioneering companies in the industry is United Food Technologies. Since the early 1990s, they have been dealing with caviar production in Germany, and the company s subsidiary, Aqua Orbis is a leader in the sale of know-how and technology to the rapidly growing number of sturgeon farms around the world, including ambitious projects in Abu Dhabi and China. But today the largest producer by far is the Northern Italy-based Agroittica Lombardia, with a market share of about 50 percent of total world production: 25 tonnes of top quality caviar based on the white sturgeon, which can be 100 years old, six meters long and weigh up to half a ton. Agroittica Lombardia in Calvisano near Brescia began as an eel farm in the 1970s, when eels were a popular delicacy in Italy. The public taste changed, and demand decreased dramatically so the owners converted the facility to the then largely unknown breeding of sturgeon, based on infant fish from the US-imported white sturgeon. Initially the business was mainly about meat production rather than eggs, and to this day the company still sells large quantities of both fresh and smoked sturgeon, which has a gentle and refined taste and colour, and texture similar to that of Greenland halibut. But they also experimented with caviar, and after 14 years Agroittica presented its first serious production on the market. Today, the farm has established a total of 60 hectares of breeding ponds. The location is not coincidental. Its neighbour is a big steel factory, which co-owns the farm and supplies one of the most important elements for sturgeon production; water at the right temperature. Water that has been previously used to cool down the steel, is led into the sturgeon farm, where it is mixed with cold water to get the optimum temperature in the farm s numerous ponds. Water temperature is extremely important for fish development, but feed is also a critical factor, and the quantity and protein composition is precisely adjusted as the fish grow. And here Denmark actually plays a role - pallets with sacks of fish feed from the Danish company BioMar are lined up in Agroitticas storehouse and make their contribution to one of the world s finest gastronomic delicacies. Agroittica sells its caviar under the name Calvisius, after a legendary local figure. Calvisius had a special love of the caviar taken from the sturgeons that used to inhabit the Adriatic Sea and the northern rivers of Italy. Caviar production is a difficult process; it requires large investments and the patience of an angel. At Agroittica

7 Lombardia, half of the breed stock die within the first year of age, and of the survivors, it is of course only the females that eventually reward all the efforts with between five and eight kilos of the finest caviar. For the white sturgeon, which makes up the vast majority of Agroitticas production, it takes some 11 years before the eggs are fully developed. By comparison, caviar from Baeri sturgeons at Caviar et Prestige in Bordeaux is ready in about half that time, but the quantity of eggs is also substantially smaller. Sturgeon breeders continually experiment with new species and hybrids to optimize production and satisfy customer demand for variation. Agroittica have recently ventured into an area that will interest any caviar-lover: a special pool of genuine Beluga sturgeons. With a weight of up to 900 kg, Beluga is the largest of the sturgeon species and a living fossil, dating back 200 million. It is also the species faces the danger of total extinction in the Caspian Sea. Until recently, Beluga has not been farmed, and there are two good reasons for this. One is that, unlike other sturgeon species, which are good-humoured herbivores, Beluga is a carnivorous predator that will happily devours the other fish in the pool when it reaches a certain age. That s why farming of Beluga relies heavily on logistics. The second is that if you think that five, ten or even twelve years is a long time to wait for a fish to produce mature caviar, it s nothing compared to Beluga. It takes 40 years of care and feeding of the fish before it is ready for slaughter and can be capitalized. A long-term investment indeed. Right now, there are a few hundred Belugas swimming in synch around the large pool at Agroittica. They are a couple of years old and about 75 cm long. Only time will tell whether it is possible to produce this well-loved caviar in farms. We will have to wait for many years to get the answer. TIMING is essential. Very little is left to chance in Agroittica, which is not only the largest but also the most technologically-advanced caviar producer. The fish have a microchip inserted in the neck, so they can be carefully monitored throughout their lives with records of their feeds, the ponds they have lived in, their development in weight, as well as data on their parents and grandparents to avoid inbreeding. All this information can be read at any time via a scanner. And the principle of one lot per fish applies throughout the whole process, so Agroittica can always identify exactly the right fish if they receive complaints from consumers. This way, they can analyse all the data in order to check if anything can be done better. After five or six years, the fish are separated by gender. While females are further bred for caviar production, the males who weigh between nine and twelve kilos are slaughtered and sold as smoked and to a lesser extent, fresh meat. The females now follow a special caviar program and at 12 years of age, they weigh up to 60 kg. For a caviar producer, it is vital that they can strike at exactly the right time to harvest eggs. If it happens too soon, the fat in the placenta is not yet integrated into the eggs, and the caviar is dry, hard and tedious to eat. If it happens too late, the caviar becomes too soft, and the membrane around the eggs breaks. To determine the right time, ongoing biopsies of the female fish of the appropriate age are taken by inserting a thin plastic tube into the fish stomach. If the egg sample is white, the fish is put back into the water for another year or two, but if it is black, the caviar is ready and the fish is slaughtered. For farmed sturgeons the period for slaughtering, where the eggs are optimal, stretches from October to April. Thus it is possible to produce according to actual sales and provide fresh produce. With wild sturgeon, there isn t the same flexibility because there are only two short windows - one in spring and autumn - where caviar has just the right maturity. On the other hand, it is easier to determine the right time, because in nature, you simply catch the female sturgeons while they are on their way along the route to the rivers spawning grounds. When this trip begins, the eggs are ready.

8 Agroittica s slaughtering department is reminiscent of a hospital. Anyone who comes in is disinfected, dressed in a white coat and has to wear a mask over the nose and mouth, plus gloves and a hat. Hygiene is very important due to the caviar s rawness and the fact that it has to remain fresh for up to six months. When the caviar in a fish has been assessed as ripe, the fish which can weigh up to 60 kg is killed and placed in an elongated V-shaped container made of stainless steel. Here the abdomen will be opened with a scalpel from top to bottom, and the fish organs, stomach, intestines, etc. are revealed. There is virtually no blood, and on both sides there are kilos of black caviar, ready to be harvested. All these precious eggs are collected from inside the sturgeon and placed in a bowl that is passed through a lock into another room, which is the factory s inner core. In here, there conditions are like that of the isolation unit at a hospital in order to avoid the entry of unwanted bacteria, which can corrupt the delicate eggs. Here the caviar is separated from fat and placenta, and then washed, weighed, salted and finally packaged for cold storage. Caviar is salted, both for taste reasons and also as a mild preservative. Traditional Russian caviar is salted quite a lot: five to seven grams per 100 grams. This improves preservation, but also minimises flavour. At Agroittica the salting is Malossol ie. light, with only two or three grams, providing a cleaner and more delicate taste, but at the same time it is even more essential that hygiene levels through the entire production until the caviar is packed into the can and the lid is put on are high. From here until the enthusiastic consumer puts the caviar spoon into their mouth, an unbroken cold chain is crucial. Caviar is a raw commodity, and it will quickly spoil if the temperature goes significantly above 3-4 degrees Celsius. The price of farmed caviar from the three major European producers is around 500 Danish kroner for 30 grams or kroner per kilo. The special variants are up to kroner per kilo. A retail price of wild, fresh Oscietre caviar, which was purchased legally, is currently kroner per kilo. But there is also an illegal trade outside the official authorities which naturally fetches lower prices. The total production of caviar from sturgeon farms is now well over 50 tonnes, but it is expected that the figure will increase tenfold by 2012 because of the many new projects launched worldwide. Which has a nice side effect; caviar-lovers can certainly expect decreasing prices because of this much bigger supply.