Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Food, Cooking, and Game Preparation Fi$h Egg$?

What do you call it, "caviar"?

Anyone flush enough eat it?

First time in Russia bought tuna sized cans of great caviar for 7 bucks a can. Brought 10 cans - it was all the store had. That was 20 some years ago. At the price today only for special days. Red caviar is not high priced and tasty but hard to find in WY. Mail order adds a bit of cost. .

I will take the fish, not the eggs

I had it a couple of times here in the USA and also in Russia several years ago. I can eat it, but I really don't care for it. Each bite is an explosion aquarium water in your mouth. Gross.

We’re not flush, but we eat it once or twice a month. We prefer the pink salmon caviar, while our friends like the fishier-tasting coho salmon caviar. Spread on a slice of crusty or light rye bread with butter, nothing better.

Price runs about $5 an ounce. I bought a frozen kilogram for Slavyanka as one of her Christmas gifts.

Every once in a while we buy a can of Beluga (sturgeon) caviar for special occasions. At $135/oz its spendy, but pretty good.

Sushi places use flying fish roe, and herring caviar is pretty good, too.

I like to meal and fry crappie eggs this time of the year. They taste like a fried egg yolk, been eating them my whole life.

You can get cheap "caviar" that's labeled "lumpfish roe". I don't know what a lumpfish is, but its roe is okay. I've never had genuine Russian caviar, so I have no real basis of comparison. I'd love to, though. If you've never had any at all, caviar is salty, fishy, and has a "bubble wrap" quality as each egg pops. I rate it as a treat, often served on a cracker with a sprinkle of crumbled hard-boiled egg or on buttered toast points.

Edit to add: After posting that, a remembery popped up in my head of a diner breakfast on the Outer Banks featuring fish roe in scrambled eggs. I recall it fondly, and have an lasting impression of the mildly fishy, salty addition favored by locals but seldom by tourists, according to the waitress. Except for me, of course. I can NEVER pass up something I've never had before.

I call it "nah"

Big negatory here. My brother eats the heck out of panfish eggs though.

Chum roe is big money

Brings back memories of growing up in Western WA. Natives would net chum by the truckload, strip the eggs and leave a massive pile of carcasses blocking the access trails down to the river. I know they are dog salmon but I always had heartburn about that.

Many runs in western AK were eliminated by roe stripping. Dogs are not worth much for food, but the roe is high dollar, for sure.

I worked on a dock for a processor one season and it seemed like the chum roe was the prize of the salmon season. Fillets and whole fish seemed to just be a bonus (kings, reds, silvers, and pinks) and kept the staff paid. The "egg room" in the plant was off limits to all employees, unless authorized. Only women were allowed in that room. Or Japanese men. Everyone was warned that you would be fired on the spot for entering the egg room, if you didn't work there.

One day, the owner and another guy (buyer?) came out to the dock, and asked to stop the belt (conveyor). They took a hen and squirted eggs into their hands, and sucked them down. Never seen anyone do that before, or since.

Rumor back then was that many of the processing plants were funded by the Japanese, primarily for the roe. People said the flesh wasn't very popular across America then. Want to say that the flesh was used for dog food or something like that, until demand increased. Might have been a tall tale though.

Now you've done it. Since making that first post, I've had a hankerin' a-thrown on me. Now I have to find some caviar - no easy task in a landlocked state where shrimp are exotic seafood.

Opened another can of herring roe this morning and cooked half of it with scrambled eggs. Caviar it ain’t, just good old-timey food from my yute.

Have a recipe for potato and herring roe cakes from GARDEN & GUN that I’ll have to try before I run out.

Mmm, they are all good, but my favourite is smoked sea mullet roe, from back in Oz.



Internet picture for reference.



Queuing Kamo Gari !!!

I have tried cooking fish eggs. I didn't care for them.

Have tried it twice, no thanks.


As a kid my Pap kept every fish egg we got and fried them.
They were ok.

Pap couldn't help himself.
Born in a coal town in 1918 to an English mother and Sweede father,
one of the youngest of 8 kids.

Took a multi year, all expenses paid, tour of Europe in the 1940's.

He wasted nothing, if it was edible, it was eaten.

Spoonbill (Paddlefish) Caviar isn’t as fishy tasting as regular caviar - but it still doesn’t taste like much to me.

One thing I've never quite grasped is why "fishy" is bad. It's fish; it ought to taste fishy. Beef is supposed to taste beefy, lamb is supposed to taste lamby, and pork is supposed to taste porky, right? Why is fish supposed to NOT taste like fish?