Because of the scarcity of the wild fish, more and more countries are farming sturgeon for caviar production. England has now joined them.
Exmoor Caviar, the first company to farm sturgeon in the U.K. to produce caviar, is gearing up for the new season which begins in late September/early October. This will be only its second production season since the company was formed less than four years ago.
The company is aiming to double its production to one metric ton (MT) in 2014-15. The last season’s production was sold to top restaurants and online, but now Exmoor caviar will also be available from one of the U.K.’s leading retailers, Selfridges of London.
Exmoor Caviar was established by businessman Kenneth Benning and father and son coldwater ornamental fish farmers Pat and George Noble. Benning had experience of importing and selling caviar in the U.K., and the Nobles had been farming sturgeon in freshwater tanks in north Devon in the south west of England since 1994.
The sturgeon used to produce Exmoor caviar — about 100 female fish — were imported from Germany, although originally they had come from countries such as Hungary, Russia and Poland.
There had been allegations that the caviar produced from these fish could not be called “British,” a unique selling point. However, the British government and the European Commission state that since the fish were farmed in the UK and the caviar was produced and packed in the U.K., ‘British caviar’ was a legal designation.
“We didn’t know how to produce or sex the [ornamental] fish,” said Benning, CEO. “So we bought some female sturgeon which we knew had caviar inside them. Other people have trained us how to sex them [sturgeon] and how to produce caviar.
‘We don’t call the fish ‘British sturgeon,’ but we do call the caviar ‘British caviar.’”
Unlike other farms in Europe where sturgeon are reared in closed re-circulation systems, the sturgeon used to produce Exmoor caviar are reared in large tanks through which water from the River Mole flows. “Over forty million liters of fresh Exmoor spring water pass through the pools at the Exmoor Caviar farm,” said a spokeman.
There are 20,000-30,000 sturgeon of different ages and sizes swimming in the six 6 meter diameter circular tanks at the farm. “The Siberian sturgeon is our only fish in production now,” said Benning, “but there are other species at the farm: sterlet, beluga, Russian (oscietra) and sevruga.”
It takes between eight and ten years for the females to become mature and produce the eggs that form caviar. After purging in clean spring water, the fish are humanely killed so the roes can be extracted for processing. This is simple and straightforward and the method hasn’t changed during the last century.
Everything is done by hand. The eggs are passed over a sieve of plastic mesh to remove the roesack and fatty membrane, then washed in cold water. Any remaining fragments of fatty tissue are painstakingly removed with tweezers.
The eggs are then treated with Cornish or Hebridean sea salt to maximize flavor and chilled for up to three weeks at minus 1 degree C before the caviar is shipped to London packed in 1.1kg or 1.8kg tins. There it is repacked to order in vacuum tins. “The Cornish salt is a very wet salt and makes for quite a soft egg,” Benning said. “The Hebridean salt is drier, so makes for a more robust taste.”
After the eggs have been extracted to produce the caviar, the remainder of the sturgeon are sold to eat, for example sturgeon fillets are smoked by Pinneys of Orford on the Suffolk coast of England.
Each 10kg sturgeon produces about 1kg of caviar. “We process eight to 10 fish per day, which is not a massive amount compared with other producers,” said Patrick Noble, company chairman.
It is a very valuable product though: 250g of Exmoor caviar costs just under GBP 500 (USD 856, EUR 633), although established brands of imported caviar are more expensive.
