When you think of caviar, do you think of inexpensive? Obviously, if it comes from one of the varieties of sturgeon, then chances are it is very expensive. Caviar is fish eggs and not all command a great price. The brush of red eggs that appear on your sushi are from Smelts and are quite nice. The two Icelandic caviar products I like come from Lumpfish ( or called LUMPSUCKER and for obvious marketing reasons they chose a less strange name) and Capelin.
Capelin is a Smelt that can be found migrating in and around Iceland and Greenland. It spawns on the beach very similarly to the California Grunion, which as a boy on a trip to Baja I remember filling an abandoned large glass water bottle and later wondered how I was going to get them out !
The Lumpfish is a strange looking fish which probably explains why they don’t place a picture on the bottle. Wikipedia has this to say about the importance of this fish to Iceland, “Lumpsuckers play an important role in the Icelandic fishing industry; Lotna ehf, a fishing company partly owned by Swansea City midfielder Gylfi Sigurdsson, have recorded catches of lumpfish as large as 2 tonnes. Other fish often caught on trawlers simultaneously with lumpfish include cod”
For a long time, non sturgeon caviar was referred to as ‘imitation’, but is it really? To me the smaller eggs are preferred. In addition, with the cost of purchasing a twelve ounce bottle ($12 -15 normally) at a small fraction of the price of a 1 ounce of a sturgeon caviar… it is a practical alternative and makes a nice garnish for an everyday meal!