How caviar is produced

How caviar is produced

A couple of weeks ago, during my prospecting trip in the southern part of France, in New Aquitaine, I had the incredible opportunity to visit the company ”Caviar-Perlite”  and learn how caviar is produced exceptional. I learned a lot about how caviar is produced, because to be honest, I had almost no idea and it was a unique experience.

In the facility, a series of pools with fresh water from the nearby river, breed thousands (more than a million to be precious) of sturgeons of the Oscietre species, which, as they explained to us, they prefer to the rest or to the Beluga, for example, as they obtain a caviar that is harder to the touch and finer in taste. Of course, they have laboratories where they monitor each sturgeon through a chip they incorporate.

First of all, they fertilize in the laboratory millions of eggs taken from their best female sturgeons, with sperm from their best male sturgeons. To give you an idea, a kilo and a half of eggs are fertilized in only 4 hours and with 15 ml of sperm! They keep them under observation in the laboratory and feed them until they are big enough to move to the outdoor pools, where they separate the females from the males. It is the females that they are interested in and they are more or less 50% of the sturgeons they reproduce.

These females will be fed and cared for with a rigorous follow-up by laboratory thanks to the microchip, for 6 years in these pools, classifying them by weight and age, until they reach the age of 6 years, they are made, one by one, the ultrasound that will show if they have already produced eggs, or what is the same, ”caviar”. If they have, they are left for 10 days without feeding, so that the caviar is purer and free of any flavor that their food may bring.

It is the moment to slaughter them, and obtain the caviar in the laboratory, which is carefully washed and classified according to size, the bigger it is, the higher the price. Their caviar is completely fresh and unpasteurized. Approximately they obtain from each female sturgeon, a 10% of its weight in caviar, so if it weighs about 6/7 kilos, they will obtain 60/70 gr of caviar, and to give you an idea, a small box of 20 gr costs 54 €. But now that I have seen the very long process and the facilities needed to obtain it, it is understandable that it is an exclusive gourmet product.

And another piece of information that caught my attention: ’Which are the major caviar producing countries?’

1- China!

2- Italy! I am even more surprised

3- France 🙂

4- Russia, when many of us think of this country when we talk about caviar, don't we?

Of course, in the end we were given this one to try. gastronomic jewel, I must admit that it was the best caviar I have ever tasted in my life (it is also true that I have only tasted it less times than I have fingers in my hands) but it was super soft, very silky in the mouth, not salty, and at the same time, hard and exploding in the mouth, a thousand sensations at once!

I hope I have explained well what was so kindly and enthusiastically transmitted to me, and that you found it interesting.

Mireia Alum