The chamber inside LaPaz Farm is so clean it almost feels like an operating room. Before we walked into the room, Sabine Mader, the manager of the farm, asks us to put on white coats, gloves and hair nets—and a beard net for my husband. Inside the chamber, a fish cutter is waiting with a freshly dispatched, female Russian sturgeon on the table, one of five to be harvested today. He deftly slices open the fish and pulls back the meat, revealing a wave of grey-black roe in the ovaries. It is the culinary equivalent of an old-fashioned coin purse slit down the middle with a treasure hidden inside. The treasure, in this case, is osetra caviar.
There isn’t much time. A team of two has 30 minutes to weigh, clean, salt, taste, and jar these black pearls before they lose quality. “No one likes mushy caviar,” Mader tells us.