Homegrown trout caviar: A new dawn for freshwater pisciculture in Utah?
By Pitamber Kaushik
It’s a delicacy so lavish that the suitable cutlery etiquette prescribed with it involves serving it in a deftly crafted mother-of-pearl spoon, often intricately decorated, in order to avoid tinting its delicate, ultrarefined flavor. These black pearls are the roe — egg masses — of the sturgeon fish Acipenseridae, particularly of the Acipenser genus.
Traditionally a zone dominated by East Eurasia with the bloom of high-end dining and increasing demand and diversification of gourmet cuisines, local suppliers have mushroomed all over America, particularly in the Great Lakes Region. When the wild caviar production was put on a brief hiatus in Russia between 2008 and 2011 to allow wild stocks to replenish, it created a supply deficit upon which the minor local caviar industries elsewhere were quick to capitalize. This temporary suspension window of the supply monopoly spared ample scope for steep development as well as discrete and distinct ascension and maturation of the American Osetra production.
While both biology and epicurean puritans and gastronomical patrons vehemently argue against calling trout roe “caviar,” labeling the act an ugly definition-stretching — nay, a warping — American companies employ this sole means to circumnavigate the sale prohibition imposed by the American government. The practice was outlawed due to preservational considerations attributed to reckless overfishing. Traditionally, caviar comes from beluga sturgeon caught in the Caspian Sea on the Russo-Persian border. Today, the need is filled by producing caviar from the roe of wild and farm-raised sturgeon, salmon, whitefish, and trout.
Unfertilized trout eggs in rural Utah farms and ponds supply to far-off gourmet eateries. The fertilized — colloquially referred to as “eyed” — eggs are sold off to hatcheries and nurseries, supplementing the income. However, as environmental standards and precautions intensify, farms find it increasingly difficult to meet the demand from sources capped by stringent constraints and sustain the transaction.
A single-pound rainbow trout will produce about a thousand eggs annually for several years in its optimum plateau phase. That’s a meager amount compared to sturgeon, which will produce an approximate hundred thousand eggs per pound.
The Utah Department of Agriculture in 2014 had to entertain an unprecedented and justified request for certification and was consequently compelled to devise proper food safety guidelines from scratch for local caviar producers to adhere to be formally safety certified. None existed before, attributable to lack of any sort of substantial fishery culture in the state.
In December, Salt Lake City’s New Yorker Restaurant, with full-fledged formality and ceremonious service, serves well apportioned servings of culinary prepared caviar in 30-gram measures, priced at a mere $70 per portion.
Enjoying extraordinary patronage ranging from Tsar Ivan IV (“The Terrible”) to James Bond through Vladimir Putin, caviar has long been the muse of the regalia and the affluent.
With extravagant patronage comes meticulous responsibility. The haute cuisine par excellence is morally obliged to uphold high informal palate standards and delicate tastes of skeptical chefs and restaurateurs — and often just-as-critical patrons and customers. But as stringent definitions dissolve and local sources become increasingly commonplace, this once esoteric delicacy is transitioning from exotica and the muse of the ultra-rich to the occasional celebratory of the upper middle class. But it still has a long way to go.
The trout roe, just as the salmon Roe, is a stark pearl orange in color but better resembles the original puritan beluga sturgeon caviar in its diminutive size. These vivid vermilions are often consumed with bread or whole bowl with potato-allium croquette, basil oil, and dollops of creme faiche (often infused with the stock of the source fish) and eggs as accompanying sides — besides the usual way imitating the beluga caviar’s serving, i.e. flanked with finely chopped hard-cooked eggs and diced onions.
Although according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization the roe of any fish not belonging to the Acipenseriformes order are not classifiable as “caviar” but better labeled “substitutes of caviar,” a criterion that befits paddlefish but tests negative for trout et al, the norm is seldom enforced but by the most meticulous gourmet connoisseurs.
However, this very scientifically well founded position is also held and conceded by most organizations, including the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, the World Wide Fund for Nature, and the United States Customs Service and France — the gastronomical Acropolis and Olympus of the world — where it constitutes an essential component of the hors d’ouvre. It’s not uncommon to stumble upon nitpicky gourmands denouncing, bemoaning, and crying foul of the falling standards of what is served as caviar at the petty eateries, bistros, and the petit brasserie — though the majority of casual bourgeois triers couldn’t bother less, especially when they’ve bigger woes as a burning hole in their pockets to attend to.
White sturgeon (Acipenser transmontanus) caviar, colloquially known as the Osetra caviar — though held as a relatively inferior grade of caviar relative to the ideal beluga and the Russian and Iranian Osetra caviars — still qualifies as true caviar, unlike trout and salmon roe, the commonplace occurrence of the fish in the Western part of the continent has immensely benefited local fisheries. They were once the main food source for First Nations people in the early 19th century until overfishing by commercial fleets for caviar shoved and teetered them to the verge extinction by the early 20th century, whereupon they were rescued from the very brink by a timely government sanction in the form of a legislation prohibiting their sale, partly attributable to the “least concern” status of the now-abundant fish. Government intervention through various departments and agencies has been instrumental to their survival and conducive to their thriving and proliferation, although young ventures claim that they pose a mild hindrance to the late blooming of this industry, struggling to keep pace with a burgeoning and diversifying demand.
White sturgeon, which are native to several large North American rivers that drain to the Pacific Ocean, primarily dwell in estuaries but migrate to spawn in freshwater and travel great distances between river systems. Inhabiting river systems in California, sparsely in sizeable but isolated landlocked freshwater pockets of Montana, and sporadically in other neighboring states, they pose the most significant competition to the endeavors of budding freshwater entrepreneurs of Utah trout roe. The prime, divisive, polarizing bone of contention among critics and ratifiers alike — the breadth and scope of stretching the definition of caviar, precisely the fact whether the nomenclature encompasses conventional proxies — shall prove the decisive factor in determining whether Utah’s trout caviar efforts shall sustain and outrival its purist neighbors and the fish’s ostensible pureblood cousin.
The Bonneville cutthroat trout, the incumbent piscine living insignia of the state of Utah, along with its former counterpart the rainbow trout, is intimately tied to both the paleogeological and the modern anthropocentric history of the river. Historically being the animate barometer and vital sign of the ecological well being of the river system, their very evolution and migration are borne of two dams: the prehistoric formative cataclysm that was the desiccation of Lake Bonneville in the Bonneville Flood, a geological event underlying the very structure of the land’s superficies; and the ambitious damming of the Columbia river, a generous source of employment during the human cataclysm of the Great Depression. It’s today a source of the budding pseudo-caviar industry in the state.
Due to the indiscriminate catching and handling late-in-life-cycle (supposedly marring the delicate, prone flavor), a recklessness towards ecology characteristic of the industry therein, and infestation of the industry by notorious outlaws and illicit poachers, the once prized, snobbishly monopolized, and proudly asserted Russian-sourced caviar is falling out of favor of both ordinary ethics-conscious restaurateurs and consumers out of both ethical and epicurean perfection-related considerations. The next best thing, Persian Frontier caviar, holds good on all the aforementioned criteria; is ecologically sustainable (in small portions), hand picked, and hence fastidious; meets ecological and humanitarian considerations, quality standards, and automatically stringent selection. But alas, Iran is not on trading terms with the USA. The qualifying and disqualifying labels premature, unfertilized and “eyed” intricacies play a significant role in determining and maintaining the delicate taste of caviar as does prompt separation, refining, and cleansing of the roe in order to rid it of the typical foul fishy odor and taste that by far overwhelms, subdues, and spoils the delicate taste and texture of the dish and ruins the savoring experience.
While the ban enacted on sturgeon fishing au naturale and various regulatory and prohibitory measures and impositions on catch, sale, rearing, and imports of the species are in place despite its demographics surmounting decent thresholds, and as Russian caviar is ruled out by many for the sake of ethical obligations, the time is ripe for Utah’s trout industry to capitalize upon the burgeoning consumer bases for the niche delicacy.
Will the former black gold of the Land of Rus prove Utah’s new black gold, a moniker befitting of the novel produce, or shall it prove to be its El Dorado? Only time shall tell — but to set the record straight, trout caviar is vermilion.
The viewpoints expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Independent.
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