Roll up Your Sleeves at The Caviar Workshop
Half a dozen people huddle elbow-to-elbow in a glass cabin the size of a broom cupboard. It is close to freezing inside but all wear broad grins. Hardly surprising since this is a caviar-tasting class.
Turquoise drums of the prized black sturgeon's eggs are stacked up the walls of the maturing chamber at Cafe Prunier, a Paris caviar house which holds weekly caviar tasting and cookery workshops over the Christmas holidays.
Scooping generous dollops from a small, chilled tin, cafe manager Alexandre Fauche lays them on the back of each taster's hand -- in the dip between thumb and forefinger -- to warm it very gently before they hoover it up.
"Now crush the eggs between your tongue and palate," he instructed.
"Delicious!" came the verdict from Michael Chetrit, a 38-year-old insurance worker who was treated to the workshop as a birthday gift. "It melts in the mouth -- I was expecting something much crunchier, saltier."
Outside on Paris' Place de La Madeleine, people hurry by with the last of their Christmas shopping. But inside time is suspended, as the tasters carefully consider each precious mouthful.
Nadine Velnon, a retired travel agent who had tasted caviar just once before, let out a groan of pleasure at the nutty rush: "It's strong and incredibly smooth at the same time," said the 60-year-old, taking part with her grown son.
After running through the house's three main varieties -- all of farmed caviar, which now accounts for the lion's share of the world market -- the group headed upstairs to the bar to learn the rudiments of caviar cuisine.
"We'll start with a walnut blini -- it brings out the hazelnut flavour in the caviar," suggested Renata Dominik, the cafe's Polish chef.
"You need at least three or four grams on a canapé to get the full effect," she explained, handing out crunchy toast slices that paired caviar with spinach leaf and house smoked salmon.
Caviar topped a tiny cylinder of sea bream tartar, on a bed of diced mango and tart apple, or a shot glass-full of cream of Jerusalem artichoke.
And the finale -- luxurious in its simplicity -- was a thimbleful of creamy scrambled egg with caviar: "What Bill Gates has for breakfast!" quipped a participant.
"They're simple recipes to start with -- but caviar really turns them into something else," said Velnon.
Exports of wild sturgeon eggs have been severely restricted since 1998 under U.N. quotas to protect the species from overfishing, and for the past two years, there have been none available on world markets, save for black gold trafficked illegally from the Caspian Sea shores.
As the supply of wild sturgeon's eggs dries up, producers have turned to farmed alternatives, whose global production has soared from 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds) in 1998 to 150 tons today.
Prunier's eggs come from its own farm in southwestern France, developed over the past 20 years with a species of sturgeon called Acipenser baeri.
The eggs are prepared with one of three recipes, from salty, Iranian-inspired at one end, to light and nutty at the other extreme, via a classic, medium-salt variety -- left to mature from one to 12 months at between minus one and plus three degrees Celsius.
Caviar prices have fallen sharply as farms yield economies of scale, opening up new possibilities for chefs, Fauche explained.
"Back in the days of Iranian caviar, chefs used to dot two or three grams on a fish," he said. "Nowadays, we spread 15 grams on a filet of John Dory -- so you can really feel the flavor."
Prunier recently slashed its basic caviar price by 40 percent, so a 30-gramme tin -- enough for a tasting session for two -- will set you back 50 euros, far short of the 200-odd euros charged for the same amount of wild caviar.
Though wary of taking the product too far down-market, Prunier hopes with its workshops to capture a new, younger clientele "who still think caviar is reserved for an elite," said Fauche.
