The complete guide to caviar

Caviar entered English in the 1590s, by way of Italian or French from the Turkish havyar. Where the Turkish word came from is still argued over.

Shakespeare's Hamlet calls a fine play ‘caviare to the general’: too good for the crowd to appreciate. The phrase is still in use.

Sturgeon and paddlefish belong to an order of fish that appears in rocks around 200 million years old, from the early age of the dinosaurs.

Beluga sturgeon can live up to a century, and wild females take around 16 to 18 years to mature.

Under ideal warm-water rearing, farmed beluga females can mature in 9 to 12 years, years sooner than in the wild.

Beluga eggs are among the largest of any sturgeon. A sterlet's are around 2.0 to 2.8 mm.

Russian does not use the word caviar at all: sturgeon roe is ikra, and red salmon roe is krasnaya ikra.

The word on so many tins is Russian for ‘little salt’: a lightly salted style, not a legal grade.

The international food standard for sturgeon caviar sets a salt content of 3 to 5 g per 100 g of finished caviar.

The EU and Great Britain allow borax in sturgeon caviar up to 4,000 mg per kg, measured as boric acid. The US does not allow it at all.

On 1 April 1998 all remaining sturgeons and paddlefish came under CITES Appendix II, so commercial international trade needs CITES permits. Small personal allowances can apply.

Species, source, country of origin, year, registered plant and lot number: the six fields printed on a legal tin. A repacked tin can carry a permit or certificate number in place of the lot.

On a CITES label the father comes first: SCHxDAU is a male Amur sturgeon crossed with a female kaluga. Codex writes it the other way round.

The United States suspended imports of beluga caviar from the Caspian basin in September 2005 and from the Black Sea basin a month later.

China went from almost no caviar to one of the world's great producers in twelve years.

In 2020 China farmed an estimated 104,280 tonnes of sturgeon, about 84% of the world's total.

France's Aquitaine caviar became an EU Protected Geographical Indication in 2025, in force from 10 March.

A female beluga taken in the Volga estuary in 1827 is the largest accepted record: around 1,500 kg and over 7 m long. Sources differ on the exact weight.

The oldest lake sturgeon on record was aged at about 152 years. A 2025 study suggests some may live far longer, though that is not yet confirmed.

The white sturgeon is North America's largest freshwater fish. A fish of about 1,500 pounds was reported from Idaho's Snake River in 1898.

Sturgeon have no ordinary scales. Rows of bony plates called scutes armour the body, and the skeleton is mostly cartilage.

Four sensitive barbels hang in front of a sturgeon's toothless mouth, feeling and tasting the riverbed for prey.

There are 25 sturgeon species and 2 paddlefish. The Chinese paddlefish was declared extinct in 2022, leaving 26.

Armenian brothers Melkoum and Mouchegh Petrossian began selling caviar in Paris in 1920, according to the house that still bears their name.

In the late 1800s the United States was one of the world's biggest caviar producers, from Atlantic sturgeon of the Delaware. A New Jersey settlement was even named Caviar.

CITES lets countries allow up to 125 g of caviar per traveller as personal effects, in properly labelled containers. It was 250 g until 2007, and national rules still apply.

The international standard allows caviar from ovulated eggs of farmed sturgeon, collected without killing the fish. It must say ‘caviar from ovulated eggs’ on the label.

In the United States the word caviar on its own means sturgeon roe. Any other roe must name its fish, as in salmon caviar.

China's caviar exports grew from under a tonne to 93 tonnes in a little over a decade.

A market study commissioned for a Chinese producer put world caviar sales at about 808 tonnes in 2025. Independent totals are not published.

The same commissioned study credits one Chinese company with about 36% of world caviar sales by volume in 2025.

The kaluga of the Amur river can grow to 5.6 m, a rival to the beluga for the title of largest sturgeon.

The American paddlefish's long snout is covered in electrical sensors that help it find swarms of tiny plankton in murky water.

In 2011 the Caspian countries agreed a moratorium on commercial sturgeon fishing. They have renewed it every year since and set no wild caviar export quotas.

The Japanese word for salmon roe, ikura, was borrowed from the Russian ikra. Its first known use in Japanese is from 1928.

Mentaiko comes from the Korean word for Alaska pollock, myeongtae, plus the Japanese ko, meaning child or roe. Its roots are in Korean salted pollock roe.

Herring roe is eaten at Japanese New Year because kazu means number and ko means child: a wish for a large family.

Bottarga, salted and dried mullet or tuna roe, takes its name from the Arabic battarikh. Sardinia's Cabras lagoon is famous for it.

Masago is capelin roe, about 1 mm across. Tobiko, from flying fish, is larger and crunchier. Both are often dyed.

Russia's national standard for granular sturgeon caviar, GOST 7442-2017, has three grades: Extra, Highest and First.

Pressed caviar, made from broken and very ripe eggs, has its own Russian standard, GOST 7368-2013, and falls outside the Codex caviar standard.

The Codex standard gives Ossetra as the usual name for both the Russian sturgeon and the Persian sturgeon. Beluga means Huso huso only.

Under Codex, caviar from a cross between two species must say so: the word hybrid belongs in the name.

The Siberian sturgeon, one of the most widely farmed caviar fish, was moved to Critically Endangered in the wild in 2022.

North America's lake sturgeon went from Least Concern to Endangered in the 2022 reassessment.

Once listed as possibly extinct in the wild, the Adriatic sturgeon was reassessed as Critically Endangered in 2022, helped by restocking.

France's protected Caviar d'Aquitaine comes from one fish only, the Siberian sturgeon, Acipenser baerii.

US guidance says that when roe other than sturgeon is called caviar, the fish's name should appear with it in type of substantially the same size and prominence.

A single skein of herring roe can hold close to 50,000 eggs, one reason kazunoko stands for plenty.

In 2022 the IUCN found every surviving species of sturgeon and paddlefish threatened with extinction. The Yangtze sturgeon is now extinct in the wild, and the Chinese paddlefish extinct.