Caviar, Sea Urchin, and Friends

I shouldn’t have splurged, but I did. So I’m writing about it.

Daniel Goldman

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Caviar, sea urchin, and other deliciousness

Caviar and sea urchin are two foods that people generally either love or hate. I love them. They’re really wonderful on their own, but they’re also delicious paired together, and with other ingredients. They add a sense of luxury to a meal. The options are endless. But what if you’re not familiar with either, or you’re not sure what to do with them besides just eat them by themselves?

I have to admit that I have expensive tastes. I don’t mean that I only eat expensive food, and I also don’t think expensive has to mean good. But a lot of the food that I like simply is quite expensive. My budget, sadly does not match those expensive tastes. However, since I’ve been staying home a lot, thanks to everything that’s been going around, I haven’t spent too much at restaurants lately, even if I include takeout. And this week I decided to treat myself by ordering some caviar and sea urchin.

Caviar

Along with truffles, caviar is probably one of the best known luxury food items. Often times “caviar” is used as a general term to refer to any kind of fish eggs. But “true” caviar comes from sturgeon. It’s expensive for a few reasons. Sturgeon take quite a while to reach maturity, and the fish needs to be killed to get the roe. Sadly, sturgeon meat itself isn’t all that popular, and it must be handled properly or it breaks down and becomes inedible rather quickly. Sadly these factors can result in a lot of waste and over fishing.

Luckily, farming sturgeon is becoming more practical and there are even methods for extracting the roe without killing the fish. So caviar is becoming more accessible and ethical each year. Hopefully these methods will help wild populations and also reduce the cost of caviar, making it accessible to more people.

I chose to try out Imperia caviar which promises high quality caviar at a fraction of the price. But I had trouble figuring out how much to buy. They offer free shipping on orders over $300, so I decided to get enough to cover the free shipping. But was it too much? I got 5 x 30g cans of both the royal ossetra caviar and 5 x 30g cans of the kaluga hybrid reserve. That’s 300g of caviar.

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I’m a polymath and a rōnin scholar. That is to say that I enjoy studying many different topics. Find more at http://danielgoldman.us