China's caviar goes on world dinner table

Caviar made of sturgeon eggs is known as "soft gold". It is one of the three most expensive foods in the world for its saffron essence and truffle par.

There are more than 20 kinds of sturgeons, but only three of them Beluga, Ossietra and Sevruga are recognized as raw materials of real caviar on the traditional market.

In 2011, some sturgeon stocks from the Caspian Sea, the traditional source for making caviar over the past century, became unwelcome to world buyers and consumers started looking for an alternative.

As early as 1997, the Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences imported tens of millions of fertilized sturgeon eggs from Russian Siberia for hatching. At the same time, its scientists also carried out breeding of wild sturgeons in the Heilongjiang River in northeast China.

In the summer 2003, as only being able to live in water between 15-23 degrees Celsius, many tons of sturgeons transported to the Thousand Island Lake, east China's Zhejiang province, died in batches due to water temperature rising to as high as 35 degrees Celsius.

Now the Hangzhou Sturgeon Technology Co., Ltd. has raised over 20 million sturgeons in the lake after overcoming numerous difficulties. Every summer when water becomes a bit warmer, fishermen would move all the sturgeons from the lake to a huge pool on an island. Here, giant pumps pumped lake water from 15 meters deep to fill the pool for cooling the sturgeons.

Another difficulty at that moment was to identify the male from the female sturgeons before they reached three years old. "The male are not worth much, if male and female are raised mixed together for seven to ten years, we will no doubt make no money," said Wang Bin, a researcher with the Chinese Academy.

Not being able to tell the sturgeon's gender from their appearance, fishermen ultimately had to invite experts from Hungary to do the sex determination.

It was a huge task -- more than 20 million sturgeons each had to do B ultrasound or puncture samples for microscopic examination.

"Eggs can be extracted only during the first 11 weeks of the sturgeon's stage 4 maturity, that is, during the eighth year of its life," Wang said. "This is very difficult to master. If a little bit too early, eggs are not rich enough, vice versa, eggs get withered."

Once extracted, 16 processing operations for the eggs must be completed within 15 minutes, when everything is done by human hands depending on their feels. The difficulty is that at that time, no Chinese fishermen knew well about how to handle these high-priced, fragile products. Having no choice, they invited processing masters from Iran to help out at high cost.

Anyway by 2006, the Thousand Island Lake sturgeon caviar, "soft gold" made in China, finally found its international markets.

Wang Bin flew to France with 400 kg of sample caviar and met the President of the World Caviar Association. Tasting the caviar, the association president did not buy even one gram, but just gave suggestions for improvement.

Half a year later when Wang returned to France he found his sample caviar unexpectedly was on the shelf of the association president's stores in Galeries Lafayette and the Champs Elysees.

Then another honor came when their caviar was sold to Lufthansa Airlines for its first class meals.

"The Lufthansa procurement manager tasted our caviar by chance, quietly purchased a bit for tracking and visited our customers," Wang recalled.

However, until Wang was invited to attend a tasting session that he knew their product had been closely watched by the airliner for a long time.

It was a real tough path forward. Together with 25 other kinds of caviar, the Chinese caviar was evaluated by blind tasters and awarded the first and second place, but not accepted during the session.

Only after Lufthansa's board of directors organized a tasting later that the Chinese caviar opened the door leading to Lufthansa.

In 2010, many European nations wrote laws to ban the fishing of wild sturgeons. As a result, the whole world produced only 150 tons of caviar, of which, China accounted for 8 to 10 percent.

China adopted the "company + farmers" farming mode, proving a greater cost advantage than the European factory production mode. By the Chinese farming mode, the producer provides unified fish species and unified feed to the fishermen, and collect the mature sturgeons after the six quality testings in three years.

Zhou Jiahao, president of Hong Hao Restaurant Management Co., Ltd. said: "In the past, the most common high-end banquet courses are shark's fin and bird's nest in China, but now, shark's fin and bird's nest are not popular for environmental protection. Restaurants take a fancy to caviar in order to fill the blank in the top ingredients."

Ni Hao, China's visiting chief adviser in Unilever diet planning, sees a bright future for caviar ingredients. "At present, caviar fares just like the red wine first entering China. Look at the red wine market now, we can know caviar is going to be accepted by the Chinese."