What I Learned About Caviar From Taking A Sturgeon Safari
Published July 25th, 2024
Photography by Jennifer Bain
It’s a silly drinking song, but you know how superstitious fishermen are. When they’re checking nets along the Saint John River in New Brunswick one misty July morning and not finding any sturgeon, they need something to turn their luck around.
Cornel Ceapa, a scientist with a PhD in sturgeon biology, breaks into a rollicking ditty in his thick Romanian-Canadian accent. “Caviar comes from the virgin sturgeon/Virgin sturgeon is a very fine fish/Virgin sturgeon needs no urgin’/That’s why caviar is my dish.”
The jinx is broken and before you know it, the father-son fishing team of Bill Ford Sr. and Bill Ford Jr. have hauled a giant sturgeon into their flat-bottomed skiff.
“Like a sturgeon, caught for the very first time,” Ceapa continues, riffing off one of Madonna’s hits as we zip about the river in our own boat watching the fishermen do their daily net checks. “LIke a stur-ur-ur-ur-geon.”
The sturgeon keep appearing. Two are released back into the brackish water, as per quota rules about the number, size and gender of fish that Ceapa’s company Acadian Sturgeon and Caviar must follow. Two females are harvested. Their eggs will be transformed into caviar. Their loin and belly meat will be sold frozen, and some meat will be hot smoked for fillets or a creamy pâté.
As a cookbook author who married a bison rancher, I’ve long loved fishing and following food from farm to table. So it’s a thrill to finally join Ceapa on a sturgeon safari that starts on the river and continues on shore with a sturgeon and caviar “academy” and five-course feast.
“Caviar is such a misunderstood food and so usually before I start my groups, I tell people to describe caviar in one word,” Ceapa says. “Most throw out words like salty, fishy, expensive. None of those are true. Ninety-nine percent of what people think about caviar is not true, so that’s why we say we need education — we need to tell people what it is.”
Here’s where I confess that I’ve always written off caviar as pretentious. Sure, I enjoyed the pomp and ceremony of the odd restaurant caviar with blinis and crème fraîche, but I didn’t develop a taste for it or really understand the appeal.
There’s nothing pretentious about Ceapa or Acadian Sturgeon’s headquarters in Carters Point, a 50-minute journey by road and car ferry from Saint John. There are trucks and boats, a processing plant and land-based hatchery, and plans for a multi-million dollar gathering space for farm tours.
We sit around a table under a tent beside a Big Green Egg cooker and a travel trailer that serves as a staging area for the food. The other three guests are locals who don’t seem particularly well-versed in eating fancy fish eggs.There’s a teacher, Todd Ross, and lawyer Michel Boudreau who has come with his retired dad John
“Cornel, I have to giggle my head off,” Boudreau admits. “You have Kirkland coffee.” After a razzle dazzle moment where Ceapa sabers Champagne to kick off our caviar tasting, he was expecting something strong and possibly Romanian — not the Costco house brand.
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Then there’s the way that Ceapa uses teeny mother of pearl spoons to take caviar from tins and put it on the back of our hands between our thumbs and index fingers so we can easily suck it up. Called “à la royale” in French, this technique is known here as “doing bumps” — which happens to be drug slang for snorting substances like cocaine.
We can’t stop laughing. However the word “bump” came into play in caviar circles, the ritual itself was created simply to prevent double dipping.
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To understand caviar, we must understand sturgeon. These prehistoric-looking creatures appeared when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, and they evolved from sharks. All 27 species around the world are either threatened or endangered. Some people believe that aquaculture can help save them.
On the Saint John River, a small commercial fishery can harvest mature Atlantic sturgeon that are over 130 centimetres (that’s about four-foot-two). License holders can catch 350 — equal numbers of males and females — in May and July while they’re migrating up the river to spawn. There’s a tagging system and biological measurements and data must be shared with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
Acadian Sturgeon was founded in 2005 to produce sturgeon and caviar in aquaculture, something that takes almost a decade to get going. Ceapa uses a small number of wild fish, caught in what he calls “a traditional and sustainable fishery,” for market development while he grows the farmed side of his business.
“The sturgeon business is really the hardest business in the world,” he figures, “especially if you’re doing it right. We raise fish for 10 years, taking care of them and giving them a good life.”
The company can produce 165 tonnes of sturgeon meat and 10 tonnes of caviar a year and sells mainly online (shipping with FedEx) but also to restaurants and even Sobeys in the Maritimes. Ceapa believes his Canadian caviar rivals Russian and Iranian versions collected from beluga, ossetra and sevruga sturgeon harvested from the Caspian and Black Seas.
“The Saint John River is really the best river in the world right now for sturgeon,” he declares. More importantly, he doesn’t use borax (sodium borate) to lengthen caviar’s shelf life and can always detect the bitter, astringent taste in foreign brands. His caviar is just fish eggs and sea salt.
Complex. Nuanced. Creamy. Educational.
Those are the words the four of us choose to describe caviar once our bellies are full of it. We do teaspoon-sized bumps of two farmed and one wild caviars, cleansing our palates with Champagne (Drappier Brut Nature), sake (Seikyo “Takehara” Junmai) and frozen vodka (Distillerie Fils du Roy Grand Bagosse) and then deciding which combination we like best.
“You make a fist,” Ceapa instructs. “You put caviar on top of the fist. You take a sip to cleanse your palate. You kind of break the eggs. You let them melt in your mouth.”
Ross loves how buttery and briny Acadian Wild caviar lingers on his tongue. For reasons I can’t articulate, I’m partial to Acadian Emerald made from farmed shortnose sturgeon and aged six months. Boudreau likes “how the flavour pops better when you rinse with the sake,” and I agree.
“We are all different. It’s not right or wrong. It’s about being open-minded and trying and comparing,” Ceapa says. “I forgot to tell you — it becomes addictive after awhile.”
Temporarily satiated, we take a break to tour the processing plant, donning disposable coats, shoe guards and hairnets and working backwards from shipping, packing, smoking and blast freezing to slaughtering. We learn how no part of the fish is wasted and how Chinese Canadians love sturgeon tripe, heads, bladders, marrow and cartilage.
“It’s easy to say nose to tail,” Ceapa points out, “but nose to tail has to be sold to your customers. If you want sustainability, then all of this has to be in the chain of sustainability. You also have to know where the food is coming from, who makes it and how long it takes.”
My favorite moment is meeting plant manager Stacy Murray and sampling freshly harvested eggs from today’s sturgeon that are laid out on a strainer waiting to be stored and aged.
In the hatchery, we marvel at giant tubs full of sturgeon grouped by age under signs asking tour groups to keep it down and not upset the sensitive fish. “The fish, they don’t talk to you,” allows Ceapa, “but if you know their behaviour, you know what they want.”
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What we want is that five-course feast, and for that we return to the tent and meet chef Markian Shafransky for a “journey from raw to cooked” that showcases sturgeon meat and caviar. “Caviar is fresh, never frozen,” he tells us. “The meat is always vacuum packed and flash frozen.”
We work our way through sturgeon tartare with a wasabi-habanero crème fraîche, a trio of cured items plated with a trendy “schmear” of smoked sturgeon pâté, an astounding chowder that substitutes earthy celeriac for ordinary celery, and a surf-and-turf course where wild sturgeon loins stand in for lobster.
It feels like the right time to crunch the numbers. A 30-gram tin of Acadian caviar sells for $90 to $110 and has six servings. If the Acadian Emerald that I liked best costs $90, that’s $15 a bump or the price of a couple of lattes.
“Don’t save stuff for special occasions,” the chef advises.
“Make the occasion special,” Ross agrees.
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In Europe, 80 percent of caviar is sold in December, but Ceapa doesn’t believe it should be relegated to Christmas. “I tell people we need to eat less but we need to eat better. We need to eat interesting things and get excited about food.”
Agreed. This exciting and educational meal ends with not one but two desserts.
Ceapa insists we try his wife Dorina’s signature crème caramel. There’s no hidden sturgeon, just a perfect marriage of eggs, sugar and milk. Shafransky’s finale is white chocolate panna cotta, heavy on the vanilla sugar, served in individual caviar tins and topped with edible flowers and generous dollops of caviar.
I’ve eaten so much and learned even more. There is a place for caviar at this Canadian’s table after all, as long as it’s the good stuff from New Brunswick.
Jennifer Bain
After a career at daily newspapers, Jennifer began travelling the world in search of quirk in 2018. She goes wherever the story is, but has a soft spot for Canada and has been to all 10 provinces and all three territories. Jennifer has won multiple awards and written two cookbooks and three travel books. She lives in Toronto but has a vacation house on Fogo Island, Newfoundland, which some cheekily say is one of the four corners of the supposedly flat earth.