Caviar is a type of food sourced from fish eggs. This food is classified as luxurious, because the price is expensive, not everyone can buy it. Quoting Simply Healthy Family, caviar has been considered a luxury food since ancient Greek and Roman civilizations.
What is caviar?
Fresh fish roe caviar as well as preserved or salted. Caviar is sourced from sturgeon fish such as beluga and sevruga which normally live in the Caspian Sea. However, due to the increasing market demand, not only fish eggs from the sturgeon family.
Salmon and herring roe are also sometimes made into caviar. However, according to caviar lovers, fish eggs other than the sturgeon family cannot be considered the same.
How does caviar taste?
Caviar tastes salty and its texture when eaten is a bit like butter. Some people find it too fishy. In fact, because of the taste, sometimes people who are new to eating caviar wonder if the price is expensive with a taste that is considered not worth it. Although, usually fishy and salty caviar is not classified as special.
Quoting the Guinness World Records page , the price of the most expensive caviar reaches USD 34,500 or IDR 506 million per kilogram. Almas caviar of Iranian beluga fish.
Caviar processing
Quoting the Bogor Agricultural Institute (IPB) website, lecturer at the Faculty of Fisheries and Marine Sciences of IPB, Wini Trilaksani explained, caviar processing tends to be difficult and requires special handling.
Once harvested, caviar must be eaten immediately or packaged in cans to maintain its quality. The way to preserve it is to give a certain degree of brine .
Apart from being given salt, canned caviar is also added acid to preserve or pasteurize. Caviar that has been preserved and packaged in cans also cannot be left unopened, because it must be consumed immediately. Otherwise the taste will change and the quality will decrease.
The demand for caviar was quite high, so sturgeon fish farming began . Cultivating fish for caviar also requires special technology. Harvest time is quite long, which is about 7 years to 10 years. Even then, only 20 percent of cultivated fish can produce eggs.
The scarcity of this species and the difficulty in breeding this fish makes caviar expensive.
