Sunday, June 10, 2012

A Roe, by Any Other Name



The swampy Atchafalaya Basin is a far cry from the cold waters of the Caspian Sea. And its lowly native bowfin, often derided as a throwaway fish, is no prized sturgeon. Yet it is laying golden eggs.

Bowfin caviar, from the single-employee Louisiana Caviar Company (motto: “Laissez-les manger beaucoup Cajun caviar!”) is earning a place on the menus at such top-notch establishments here as Commander’s Palace and Restaurant Stella. The executive chef of Galatoire’s Restaurant, Michael Sichel, served it up at the New Orleans Wine and Food Experience last month, an annual bacchanal.

And now, even the Russians are coming.

“There’s pretty good demand from lots of clients,” said Igor Taksir, a Russian-born exporter who ships the glistening roe, which is actually black but turns yellow-gold when cooked, to Moscow and Ukraine. Mr. Taksir said he was “skeptical in the beginning,” when he discovered bowfin caviar at a seafood show in Boston three years ago. “But when we started tasting,” he said, “we realized the quality was surprisingly good.”

Still, this is not the caviar of gilded dreams. If beluga sturgeon from the Caspian Sea, the king of them all, is paired best with Champagne, then bowfin from the bayou, some of it infused with hot pepper and served deep-fried, might go better with a beer. It represents what is a populist twist and an accommodation by chefs to the environmental and ethical realities that come with serving Russian and Iranian caviar.

Global efforts to all but ban the international trade of caviar from the Caspian Sea, where overfishing and pollution have depleted sturgeon populations, have opened enormous opportunities for affordable substitutes from unlikely places in America. Even landlocked Montana, North Dakota and Oklahoma have thriving markets based on wild river fish.

“I think any chef or any food person with a conscience is only eating domestic or farmed caviar,” said Mitchell Davis, executive vice president of the James Beard Foundation.

The world has come to have a taste for the growing American market of caviar and fish roe. Between 2001 and 2010, annual exports of white sturgeon, shovelnose sturgeon (also called hackleback) and paddlefish roe increased to about 37,712 pounds from roughly 5,214 pounds, with a majority of wild origin, according to the American branch of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora and the federal Fish and Wildlife Service.

Seventy percent of the total caviar and roe exported from the United States in 2010 went to countries in the European Union, Ukraine and Japan. (...)

Some caviar enthusiasts will never agree.

“I haven’t sampled bowfin myself, and quite frankly wouldn’t want to,” said Ryan Sutton, the food critic at Bloomberg News, who has lived and studied in Russia. Mr. Sutton was also critical of American paddlefish caviar, which he described as lacking both texture and flavor.

In caviar, a taster wants firmness and pop, “with a clean flavor of the sea,” Mr. Sutton said. (...)

Even the fact that the Food and Drug Administration allows the roe from fish other than the sturgeon to be called caviar — as long as it is qualified by the fish’s name, as in “bowfin caviar” — rubs some people the wrong way.

“The F.D.A. looks at the word ‘caviar’ as synonymous with roe, but that is not true,” said Douglas Peterson, associate professor of fisheries and aquaculture research at the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources at the University of Georgia. “Caviar only comes from sturgeon,” he said. “Everything else is fish eggs.”

Susan Saulny, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo: William Widmer for The New York Times