One of the tastiest and most luxurious hors d'oeuvres is soft-boiled quail eggs with caviar. Eggs on eggs. It's really gotta be served with champagne. But how does the regular family afford enough Osetra caviar at $60/oz to be generous with it? They can't, because a minimal dose is about 1 oz. per person. We'll get to that in a minute.
Best way to eat fine caviar? Off those tiny caviar spoons with a shot of Russian vodka. Second best? On a blini. Third best? On a quail egg.
(By the way, if you have any left-over caviar, it's great on regular soft-boiled eggs or on top of an omelette the next day. It also freezes pretty well.)
Since I'm on the topic of caviar, a chef friend's favorite sandwich is a toasted bagel with creme fraiche (or the very heavy type of sour cream or, at worse, cream cheese) with a pile of caviar and a sweet onion.
The great caviars of the world are, of course, from the various varieties of Sturgeon. Today, sturgeon are farm-raised in some places (eg this French farm raised caviar). Yes, there are wild sturgeon in America (relatively endangered) and every once in a while somebody pulls a 16-footer out of the Hudson River.
Farm-raised American Sturgeon caviar ain't cheap. Let's take a look at the American non-Sturgeon caviars, those caviars for us plebs.
Cheapest is caviar from the roe of the Lake Whitefish. Whitefish Caviar is better than nothing, but it's basically low-rent supermarket caviar, around $10/oz.
Another cheap one is often marketed as American Pride. It's the roe of something they call a Golden Herring. I don't know what that fish is. 7 ounces for $50. Inexpensive enough to use in volume.
My third cheap one is often marketed simply as American Black Caviar. It's the roe of the Bowfin, a primitive cool-water fish of the US and Canada. Fishermen consider it to be an annoying trash fish:
Down Cajun way they call that Choupique. It can be got for $7/oz. Cheap enough to use on pasta as in this dynamite recipe.
Here's a stranger fish from which the roe is marketed: The American Paddlefish. It's a cousin of the sturgeon, lives in the Mississippi River drainages. Here's one plankton-feeding:
I've never had Paddlefish Caviar, but I'd like to try it. Wild American Paddlefish Caviar goes for around $30/oz. It's a shame that you can't squeeze the roe out of a fish and then let the fish go to make more.
Here's a little summary of American caviars.
