Having Fun With Buckwheat

Tonight was a good night. Tonight the Caviarblog team decided to recreate the world famous blini’s from Restaurant Gary Danko. Our recreation was largely a reverse engineering effort given that we didn’t have the recipe. We got as close as we could and I must say they came out damn tasty.

To accompany our blinis, we had the trio of delectable roe seen to the right: Paddlefish, White Sturgeon and Trout caviar. These three offered us a nice wide range in grain size, flavor, and price.

The trout is the largest of the three as you can see in our picture. It is roughly twice as large as the White Sturgeon, which is the species Acipenser Transmontanus. It in turn is also roughly twice as large as the Paddlefish.

The size is definitely not the driving factor in the price, as the trout is least expensive of the bunch at roughly $15-20/oz. Trout caviar is one of the best values in caviar. It has a mild briny flavor that will immediately separate it from the similar looking Salmon Roe, or Ikura, that is familiar to sushi eaters. Ikura is usually a bit more salty. This was a hard shelled trout roe and the pop created tiny little flavor explosions in our mouths.

This roe was delicious by itself but was just scrumptious on our blini. Here you can see a bite we made with some smoked salmon and a little creme fraiche.

Paddlefish is priced just a tad bit higher than the trout, usually at $25-35/oz. When we tasted it off our hand in its purest form, we noticed a good flavor that had a slightly bitter finish (in a good way). Paddlefish makes a great compliment to a lot of flavors and you can see here they we added a little spice with a few chilies. This is a great example of having fun with Caviar.

Last but definitely not least was the white sturgeon.  It is the highest priced of the bunch and usually runs around $60-70/oz. As always, it was a real treat to have genuine sturgeon caviar. The white sturgeon had a nice complex, even robust, flavor. Eaten straight off the hand, it was a delightful treat. We also enjoyed it with our buckwheat blini in variety of combinations. The warm blini and the almost creamy caviar made for a real cozy night.