Sun, Jan 04, 2015 page14

• After mastering vodka, Poland moves to caviar

  • By Bernard Osser / AFP, RUS, Poland
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  Foodies, take note: After flooding the global market with its vodka, apples and berries, Poland has gone gourmet and is trying its hand at making black caviar.

  Dressed from head to toe in sterile clothing, a worker leans over a sieve containing roe from Russian and Siberian sturgeon. She uses tweezers to remove any leftover bits from the ovary sack — anything to ensure the quality of the caviar. Nor is hygiene to be trifled with at the fish farm in the northern Polish village of Rus.

  “We produce unpasteurized, fresh caviar, so we have to make sure it doesn’t come in contact with even the smallest speck of bacteria,” farm head Marek Szczukowski said. “The taste of caviar largely depends on the quality of the air, the water, its temperature, the feed, but also the method used to obtain the eggs.”

  

  Female sturgeons swim in a tank at a fish farm in Rus, Poland, on Dec. 15.

  Photo: AFP

  Everything is up to hospital standards: Employees handle the precious eggs, whose colors vary from golden brown to olive to black, in a room fit for surgery. All the equipment, the walls, the floor and even the ceiling are stainless steel. As for the staff: no shower, no entry. The same goes for anyone without a hygiene mask, nurse cap and scrubs. The air is swapped out 20 times an hour and the room is sterilized for six hours every night.

  Outside, thousands of sturgeon swim around in fish canals fed by the crystal clear water of the Lyna River. The fish are slim and muscular, with a pointed mouth for the Siberian sturgeon and a rounder one for the more coveted — and expensive — Russian variety.

  Each female weighs between 10kg and 20kg and carries roe totaling about 12 percent of its weight. Before winding up in Rus, the sturgeon spend the first seven or eight years of their lives on a parent farm in Goslawice in central Poland. It extends across 2,000 hectares of lakes and 500 hectares of ponds heated by a nearby power plant.

  

  Employees make sturgeon caviar at a fish farm in Rus, Poland, on Dec. 16.

  Photo: AFP

  “We are the biggest fish farm in Poland and one of Europe’s three main sturgeon producers,” marketing and sales manager Agata Lakomiak-Winnicka said. “We began farming sturgeon in 1992 and have been supplying Europe’s top caviar producers with it since 2008.”

  “They’ve been a huge hit, so it was just a matter of time before we launched our own brand, Antonius,” she added.

  Today, the two farms have more than 1,000 tonnes of sturgeon swimming throughout their waterways.

  Traditionally, caviar was made from eggs from wild sturgeon in the Caspian and Black seas with the best-known producers in Russia and Iran. Yet years of overfishing and pollution have left the sturgeon at risk of extinction.

  The fish is protected under the 1973 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. Still, demand continues and caviar prices have skyrocketed, now retailing from about 1,700 euros (US$2,100) per kilo, prompting many countries to try to cash in.

  In 2012, caviar producers made 260 tonnes of the fishy delicacy in countries including France and Italy, but also Israel, Uruguay and even Vietnam, the World Sturgeon Conservation Society said.

  The trickiest part of production is seasoning the eggs. Many years of experience go into determining the right amount of salt.

  “Making caviar is an art. There’s no ready-made recipe,” Szczukowski said.

  The whole operation takes no more than 15 minutes, from carving out the roe-filled ovaries to vacuum packaging the caviar in elegant black-and-white boxes with the Antonius label.

  “We want Poland to have its own caviar brand recognized around the world,” Lakomiak-Winnicka said.

  The potential is there, said French chef Michel Moran, who has lived in Poland for 15 years.

  “We’re able to raise great quality livestock, we have great fish,” Moran said. “I don’t mean the Baltic Sea, unfortunately, but if we get our fish from fresh water, we’re able to raise some really good stuff. And now, a caviar like this, I’m convinced there’s a place for it on the market.”
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