Caviar, also known as caviar sauce, pickled products such as sturgeon eggs and salmon eggs. It means fish eggs in Persian. Strictly speaking, only sturgeon eggs can be called caviar.
The most famous producing areas of caviar are Russia or Iran on both sides of the Caspian Sea. The Caspian Sea is the largest inland water area in the world and the hometown of sturgeon. The waters here contain special algae, which are the staple food of sturgeon. Fishermen catch female fish in spring and autumn and take eggs to make caviar. The history of fishing and hunting sturgeon in Russia was the earliest. In the12nd century, Russian caviar was well known, and the French learned from the Iranian emperor to eat caviar.
Extended data:
Caviar, round and full of granules, tastes fishy and salty when it breaks at the entrance.
In a narrow sense, caviar is made only from the eggs of sturgeon, and caviar produced in Caspian Sea is the best.
In France, Caviar refers exclusively to sturgeon eggs, and is called the three most luxurious foods in the world together with foie gras and black truffles. It is also known as "black gold" or "Caspian black pearl" because of its rare output and dark color. Caviar has no brand name, only grade and quality. High-quality caviar comes from only one kind of wild sturgeon: European herring, Oseltra sturgeon and Flash sturgeon.
The great white sturgeon with the best quality of sturgeon eggs can produce the most precious and rare caviar in the world. The color of the great white sturgeon caviar ranges from light gray to gray-black, with a fine transparent film surrounding the slightly larger caviar, which has always been known as the "Caspian Pearl". Usually, the catch of this sturgeon, Amur sturgeon, is less than 100 in a year, accounting for only 2% of the total catch of sturgeon, and the number is really pitiful.
The main reason for the low yield is the slow growth of this sturgeon. It takes about 18 to 20 years from a young fish to a large enough fish body to mature and lay eggs. With such a long growth and breeding process, it is not easy to live well in the increasingly serious situation of overfishing in the Caspian Sea, not to mention that there must be no mistakes in these years, and it is really necessary to rely on the ancestors.
In fact, Beluga's life span can be over 100 years, its body length can exceed 4 meters, and its weight is nearly 1 metric ton. The fully mature giant white sturgeon is about 60 years old, and there are also a few caviar produced by giant white sturgeon over 100 years old, so there is no need to mention the preciousness.
The second-class Acipenser ocellata is small, weighing only 80 to 200 pounds, and its growth period is only 12 to 14 years. Its roe is grayish brown and shiny with black gold, with a unique nutlike flavor, which is not as good as "Caspian Pearl" in taste, but has a unique fruit flavor.
It only takes seven years for the more common flash sturgeon to grow up. The roe is not as big as the Caspian Pearl, but the color is similar. The roe with spherical particles and gray-black color is favored for its full and rich roe flavor, but it tastes more like specially selected roe, and the flavor specificity is not as good as that of the great white sturgeon and the Australasian sturgeon.
Baidu Encyclopedia-Caviar