Step Aside Beluga, Canadian Caviar is Here

The caviar most of us think about is black and made from sturgeon eggs (illegal to harvest commercially in Manitoba). The golden variety produced here comes mostly from whitefish and the prehistoric-looking northern pike. Last year, 39,000 kg of whitefish eggs and about 43,000 kg of pike roe were harvested from Manitoba lakes, as well as those of neighboring Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories. Roe is also harvested from tullibee, also known as cisco, pickerel, known as walleye, and carp.

It’s a whole lot cheaper than the top-end stuff. Whitefish roe, for example, sells for about $40/kg wholesale, as opposed to hundreds of dollars for a single ounce of beluga caviar. And unlike Eastern European and Central Asian roe, the Canadian varieties are sustainable, harvested from “managed” fish already destined for the dinner table.

The biggest customers are Scandinavia and the former Soviet Union. But before the eggs arrive on a table in MalmÁ¶ or TimiÈ™oara, they pass through a drab commercial building in suburban Winnipeg, headquarters of the Freshwater Fish Marketing Corporation.

“A good egg presents well,” says Dave Bergunder, director of operations at Fresh Water Fish. “It sticks together well on a cracker. That’s a good egg.”

Bergunder, whose office is papered with maps of Manitoba’s lakes, says the province began exporting roe in the 1970s after discovering a niche market in Scandinavia, where roe has long been a staple.

“We were buying the fish and the fishermen were just throwing the eggs away or feeding the ravens,” he says. “Looking over the last fiscal year, [caviar] was worth over $700,000 to the fishermen in the raw form.”

These days, if you were to visit a buffet aboard a Scandinavian cruise ship in the Baltic Sea, you’d see piles of Canadian whitefish roe, eagerly consumed by wayfaring Finns and Swedes.

Further east, in countries like Ukraine and Romania, pike is the roe of choice, followed by carp, which is also eaten in Israel and is an ingredient in a Greek dish called Taramasalata.

Since selling roe can increase the value of a catch by as much as 30 percent, there’s a powerful incentive to develop new types of caviar. Recently, Fresh Water Fish began experimenting with lake trout. Mullet is next, if they can figure out how to extract the eggs without damaging them.

“I don’t think there’s a bad egg anywhere,” says Bergunder. “We can find a home for anything.”

Caviar production in Manitoba is a three-season industry halted only during the first months of the frigid Manitoba winter. Harvest time for northern pike and pickerel runs from about January to April. Whitefish and tullibee eggs are harvested in the fall, and lake trout in August and early September.

“Carp seem to be ready all the time,” says Bergunder. “They lay their eggs, then refill their gonads and they’re good to go again. It’s an amazing fish.”

There are very few steps between gonad and plate.

The Fresh Water Fish plant is a 110,000-square-foot hive of efficiency. Roughly 14.4 million kg of fish pass through its doors every year. Stark white and buzzing with machinery, the plant is engineered to chop, slice and flash-freeze fish by the bucket load.

Hundreds of northern pike, bound for kosher markets in New York City and Chicago, are motoring upward on a belt toward an aging rabbi who appears to be asleep in his chair.

The roe is processed in its own section of the plant, which looks like a quarantine zone, the floors coated in antiseptic foam, the workers clad in rubber boots, smocks, and full-face hairnets.

Today, they’re processing pike eggs, brought in on ice and still in their sacks. They’re opened, sifted free of blood clots and other detritus, then washed, drained, and poured into a machine that extrudes the roe like soft-serve ice cream into plastic tubs for sale overseas.

“In Romania, you can walk into a major shopping center and you will see 20 feet of caviar products,” says Rob Black, business development officer at Fresh Water Fish. “Although their purchasing power is considerably less than what we have in North America, they are willing to spend a much higher portion of their money on roe.”

North Americans, he says, just aren’t fish egg eaters.

In fairness, it’s an acquired taste. Eaten straight, the roe is salty, slimy, and possesses a distinctly “lakey” quality. It’s quite good, but you don’t think to yourself, “Gee, I can’t believe that’s fish eggs.”

Even with its overseas popularity, Manitoba’s golden caviar isn’t likely to compete with fine sturgeon roe anytime soon. And that might be a good thing. Black says he believes the lower price is broadening the appeal of fish eggs.

“When only sturgeon caviar was available, most people shied away,” he explains. “They weren’t out to experiment with something that was going to cost them a week’s salary… now you can bring caviar to a dinner party.”

That probably depends on who’s hosting.

Photo: Max Leighton

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