Sterlet caviar

Caviar sterlet

What it is

Before Russia reached the Caspian and its giant sturgeons, the caviar it sold to the courts of Europe through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came from the Volga sterlet — a fish rarely a metre long, called the tsar fish for the table it was kept for. It ripens in a handful of years where beluga needs twenty, which is why it is the sturgeon small European farms now stock.

In the kitchen

The grain is thin-skinned and collapses at the first sign of heat, so it goes on cold or barely warm and last of all. Its salt is low, which means it keeps for days rather than weeks — buy it for the meal you are cooking.

Goes with

Crème fraîche Potato Egg Butter Cucumber Hazelnut Dill

Same species

Caviar Baerii caviar White sturgeon caviar Adriatic sturgeon caviar Osetra caviar Pressed caviar

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