Why does caviar cost so much

The reason as to why sturgeon caviar is so expensive seeps through many avenues of time, curated conditions, and finally the experience of taste. Pop a silver spoon into a jar of salt cured black pearl sturgeon caviar and the senses seem to come into perfect alignment. When you invest in the black pearls of the Caspian Sea you are purchasing the taste of centuries of commitment, decades of delicate tweaking, and years of love and waiting. Considerable number of burst eggs and membranes.

Over-dried eggs Eggs firmer than non-pasteurized eggs, easy to separate; presence of lumps and some juice acceptable Sturgeon and salmon roe are not very susceptible to efforts to redefine good flavor and texture because the perception of what constitutes good taste in these products is well established, see the tables below.

Weak typical sturgeon odor, no off-doors acceptable Slight, sharp, sour, yeasty, stable off-odor acceptable Typical for pasteurized sturgeon. Egg membranes melt leaving a pleasant viscous liquid impression. Individual egg membranes are slightly recognizable. Some sharpness; grassy or muddy after-taste acceptable. Weak sturgeon flavour, not offensive, interfering flavours. Over-dried, recognizable dryness and total loss of the membrane melting phenomenon Typical for pasteurized caviar.

Mild, modified yolky a pleasant flavour; egg membrane is tougher than for non-pasteurized caviar, slight chewiness acceptable. It looks something like this:. The front of the tin can be very attractive, but it does not provide enough information. If you want to reassure yourself about the tin, you need to check the back. It is important to remember that the quality of caviar can be very varied. So, it is important that you check what is in the tin. This is the only way that you can be sure that you are getting the best roe.

It is a body that guarantees the quality of the delicacy. It will also tell you which country the caviar comes from. This is therefore caviar sourced from the waters of the Caspian. This sea produces the best caviar such as Almas. The CITES information can afford a consumer the knowledge they needed to make the best choices even when shopping online. At all times check the Source Code, this can ensure that you are getting high quality product that can provide you with great dining experience.

There are tins that make many claims and they may appear to be trying to confuse the customer. They want to appear as if they come from Iran which produces the most expensive caviar.

These phrases are often used by farms from China and Europe to make their product more appealing. So be careful. This is their natural environment, and they are regarded as the King of the Fish.

Sturgeon has a long breeding cycle and the fish can take years to become sexually mature. There is also the problem of overfishing in the past and illegal smuggling has also been a problem. The threat to the species is so great that governments have come together to protect the three main sturgeon species, and these are the Beluga , Osetra , and Sevruga. Since it is no longer possible to fish for sturgeon in the waters of the Caspian the only caviar that is available is from fish that is harvested in special farms.

These farms contain the waters that the sturgeon have long since thrived in. It also has the plankton that provides the fish with the best diet. It has proven to be almost impossible to duplicate the conditions of the Caspian elsewhere in the world, in other sturgeon farms.

There have been many attempts at duplicating the conditions of the Caspian, but none have really worked. The waters of the largest inland sea are too different from anything else and this really impacts negatively on the fish.

Despite massive investment and technology farmers from China to Europe have not been able to reproduce the quality of Russian and Iranian caviar. Moreover, it can take up to20 years before a farm become viable and can produce roe. This means that the roe that comes from the Caspian is that much more expensive than those from elsewhere. There are three main species of sturgeon and they are Beluga , Ostera and Sevruga.

There is also a species related to the Ostera, known as Persian Ostera. They all have different source codes as shown below. This can be very important in determining the price of the roe. The CITES organisation tracks all the caviar harvested around the world in order to promote sustainability and to ensure quality.

Because of this every tin has a unique character and this may account for some of its expense. It has taken a thousand years to develop the process that goes into making the roe so delicious and the favorite of Presidents and Monarchs. The process was first developed on the southern shores of the inland sea by Ancient Persians. They have made the delicacy such a success and they still use the traditional process, which makes caviar so unique.

The product is not just great tasting, but it has great nutritional value and healthy. The recipe for producing the caviar is a closely guarded secret that has been kept in families for generations. No one knows the exact steps that are involved in the process. However, in recent years technology has been used to make it even better and to provide the consumer with an even better product.

This can be an expensive process. The Iranians have kept the process a closely guarded secret and they have not disclosed their trade secrets to others.

Only trusted people have full knowledge of the system and this means that non-Iranian producers are not as skillful when it comes to the process. The Iranians are justly proud of their skills and this means that they receive high prices for their products.

Moreover, their product contains less salt than other national producers. French, Israeli, Chinese and others add more salt because their products are not that flavorsome. It is important that caviar is treated in the right way for the safety of the consumer.

This can be found near the lot number. It is important to establish how the caviar was harvested, packaged, and its expiration date.

The more expensive caviar generally offers a lot of information. Is it pasteurized? This means that it is safe to eat and healthy. There are some tins that used the word fresh instead of pasteurized. The best quality caviar has been pasteurized.

If it has typically good viscosity in the interior of the eggs. This product needs to be pasteurized in a particular way, or else it is not of a high quality. This means producing the delicacy is high. Caviar has different defects and it deteriorates at a different rate and way. It is important to understand these, so that you can buy the best and get value for money.

There are certain defects that occur during processing and in storage. This can detract from the the taste of the caviar , and in general the most expensive caviar is less prone to defects. One of the most common problems with roe both of salmon and sturgeon, is sharpness of taste. This is something that leaves an unpleasant aftertaste. The caviar with a sharp taste can be really unpleasant.

This taste is often accompanied by sourness and bitterness. There is also a strong smell that is not appealing and can detract from the culinary experience. Good caviar unlike other fish roe does not have a really fishy odor.

This is because of the rich fat of the eggs unlike other roe which has a low-fat content. If caviar has a sharp taste and unappealing smell, it is usually caused by microbiological and enzymatic spoilage. This is a common problem for cheaper caviar , and it is a result of decomposition.

The eggs begin to lose their shape and the release a sticky liquid, that appears between the eggs. This quickly becomes a translucent slime, and this can lead to a mold and yeast growth. This can be found on the product and the package. The Chinese had never made such a thing of caviar as their Russian and Iranian neighbours, although Acipenser schrenckii and Huso dauricus were numerous in the Amur River that forms the boundary between China and Russia.

Then, at the height of the Cold War in the Sixties, China decided to create a caviar industry of its own for much the same reason that the ayatollahs of Iran later did. This was easier planned than done. So, while official diplomatic relations between the three superpowers were strained, the sturgeon-fishing stations on the Chinese side of the Amur River were built by the Bechtel Corporation of America, to specifications provided by Russian experts; the whole project being financed by the Californian Sunshine Fine Foods company, thus illustrating the power of financial self-interest to overcome any obstacle.

For a brief period in the Eighties, sturgeon fishing and caviar production was an orderly and relatively well-managed business. However, Caspian sturgeon were already having a tricky time thanks to poor river management, overfishing, pollution and natural happenstance, and were in steep decline. Then, in , the Soviet Union collapsed and with it the Ministry of Fisheries, guarantor of Russian caviar production. Suddenly, centralised control vanished and those states with coastal claims to parts of the Caspian Sea and its rivers — Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, as well as Russia and Iran — all started exercising their rights to harvest caviar.

In the absence of an enforcement agency, Caspian caviar production became a true free market, in which Russian criminal gangs took a keen interest. Demand for this, the most desirable of fish eggs, like that for diamonds, always endures. Never exactly a transparent industry, it now became a murky free-for-all, with only Iranian caviar production maintaining any kind of integrity or quality control. Overfishing became rampant. Pollution took its toll.

Perhaps most damaging of all, dams had been built on the Volga, Ural and Terek rivers that flow into the Caspian, restricting the movements of the sturgeon.

Catches on the Caspian Sea declined by 70 per cent between and The sturgeon of the Amur River eventually succumbed to the same fate as those in the Caspian. Indeed, the global situation for sturgeon became so bad that in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species CITES persuaded the Caspian countries and the Chinese to stop the sale of caviar from wild fish altogether.

And that, by and large, is the situation today. Farming sturgeon, however, has not brought clarity to the industry. If the former situation was murky, it now becomes bewilderingly fragmented. New countries are joining the caviar club almost by the month. In the confusing realm of international caviar, the largest shareholder 24 per cent in Hangzhou is Bill Holst, a scrap-metal merchant from Wisconsin, USA.

While caviar from wild fish might be all but non-existent, the growth in demand has been exponential. The system for producing caviar is disarmingly simple. Modern distribution systems are quick and smooth. Computerisation gives instant traceability. What could possibly go wrong? Well, rather a lot, to judge by the number of sturgeon farms that have gone bust. First off, you need fish, a good body of clean water, and time — lots of time.

Anyone hoping to make quick returns from farming sturgeon is going to be disappointed. Sturgeon of whatever species take a long time to reach sexual maturity when they start producing eggs. Different species mature at different times. For example, females of the largest of the sturgeon family, Beluga, require 16 to 18 years to reach that point.

Incidentally, the largest sturgeon ever recorded was a female Beluga caught in the Volga in ; she weighed 1,kg, was 7. These hybrid fish have added their own caviars to the Beluga, Oscietra and Sevruga line up, namely Imperial eggs of Huso dauricus bred with Acipenser schrenckii ; and Platinum gueldenstaedtii bred with Acipenser baerrii — the Siberian native. Whatever the species, it takes an unconscionably long time before you start getting a return on your investment and sturgeon take a good deal of looking after.

In this blog, we will tell you. Caviar is considered one of the most expensive foods on the market. Perhaps you have come this far because you do not know its value and why it is a high priced product. Here we answer that question related to caviar. The spoon university online portal reveals that caviar has another, more common name — fish roe , as this is what caviar is: fish eggs.

The fish from which they take their eggs from caviar is a beluga sturgeon species , which lives in rivers and lakes in eastern Europe.

Still, an enormous amount of this fish is found in the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea. The beluga sturgeon fish is the only species that can produce black caviar , so it is unique.

Several factors make caviar so expensive :. The first is what we mentioned earlier about the fact that a single fish is the one that produces this type of eggs. Another factor related to the species that produces it is that the female takes up to 20 years to mature to make caviar. But due to its high demand, scarcity, and overfishing, some sturgeon fish species were threatened.

Due to this, currently, there are sturgeon fish hatcheries to control their production. The increase in the price of a product is mainly due to two factors: supply and demand.