Black caviar production in Granada

Some 60 kilometers from Granada along a highway leading to Malaga there is a road leading to a small village called Rio Frio (Cold River in Spanish). Here is the purest spring which Spanish businessmen use to raise sturgeon and produce black caviar. Sturgeon is common in the rivers of Guadalquivir and Douro, but in the mid-1970s they almost died out.

In the late 1980s, Piscifactoria de Sierra Nevada (PSN) decided to revive the Adriatic sturgeon (Acipenser naccarii). PSN produced the first batch of black caviar (30 kilograms) in 2001, and in 2010 the company expects to produce up to three tons of this delicacy. Now the fishery basins house more than 50,000 sturgeon weighing around 350 tons total.

Caviar production is an absolutely environmentally friendly process. Each basin houses a small amount of fish of a certain age: from fries to females aged 16-18 which are ready to spawn.

Specialists carefully prepare the fish which are ready to spawn and then cut their belly that is full of silver-black caviar.

The caviar in a skim is placed in a large plastic bowl. Up to 3 kilograms of caviar can be extracted from a fish 1.5 meters long.

The rest of the fish is processed to make canned goods, smoked products or directly sent to a restaurant.

The caviar is cleaned and mixed with salt and borax (Е-285), which serves as a natural preservative.

Salty caviar is generously put into cans. The full cycle of caviar production from killing the fish to sealing the cans takes around 50 minutes.

Surprisingly, the cans look like those with a blue lid and a picture of sturgeon on it which were sold in the Soviet Union.

Caviar from each fish is put into cans of various sizes and a small can is left to allow the quality of each caviar batch produced to be controlled.

The cans are sealed by pressuring on the lid so that there is no excess water or oil left. The procedure is repeated several times.

The sealed cans are kept in a special container at the temperature of 3-4 degrees below zero from 3 to 9 months until excess water and oil leak out