June 9, 2012 — NEW ORLEANS — The swampy Atchafalaya Basin is a far cry from the cold waters of the Caspian Sea. And its lowly native bowfin, often derided as a throwaway fish, is no prized sturgeon. Yet it is laying golden eggs.
Bowfin caviar, from the single-employee Louisiana Caviar Company (motto: “Laissez-les manger beaucoup Cajun caviar!”) is earning a place on the menus at such top-notch establishments here as Commander’s Palace and Restaurant Stella. The executive chef of Galatoire’s Restaurant, Michael Sichel, served it up at the New Orleans Wine and Food Experience last month, an annual bacchanal.
And now, even the Russians are coming.
“There’s pretty good demand from lots of clients,” said Igor Taksir, a Russian-born exporter who ships the glistening roe, which is actually black but turns yellow-gold when cooked, to Moscow and Ukraine. Mr. Taksir said he was “skeptical in the beginning,” when he discovered bowfin caviar at a seafood show in Boston three years ago. “But when we started tasting,” he said, “we realized the quality was surprisingly good.”
Still, this is not the caviar of gilded dreams. If beluga sturgeon from the Caspian Sea, the king of them all, is paired best with Champagne, then bowfin from the bayou, some of it infused with hot pepper and served deep-fried, might go better with a beer. It represents what is a populist twist and an accommodation by chefs to the environmental and ethical realities that come with serving Russian and Iranian caviar.
Global efforts to all but ban the international trade of caviar from the Caspian Sea, where overfishing and pollution have depleted sturgeon populations, have opened enormous opportunities for affordable substitutes from unlikely places in America. Even landlocked Montana, North Dakota and Oklahoma have thriving markets based on wild river fish.