Cincy caviar ranchers bringing indulgence to your plate

Renee and Keith Koerner have sunk their retirement portfolio deep: it's 5 to 20 feet under the surface of area lakes, swimming in circles.

They've staked everything they have on a prehistoric fish with a weird 2-foot long paddle sticking from its head that takes ten years to produce a salable product.

But when it does, it's one of the most valuable foods you can sell, measured in amounts usually used for illegal drugs.

The Koerners are caviar ranchers. They raise American paddlefish, harvest its roe and turn it into caviar. There has always been wild paddlefish caviar, but it's been treated as a commodity.  Renee, with a background in wine and fine dining, is taking extra care with hers, making an artisanal product that she hopes will rival the quality of Russian caviar, from sturgeons so overfished that it is out of reach.

"We're creating an industry," said Renee. She thinks of it like wine, which she has served and sold throughout her career in fine dining, as maitre d' at Maisonette, as a rep for Vintner Select wines. There is a big difference between some kinds of fermented grape juice and others.

"Caviar will always be somewhat expensive," she said, "But ours will be within most people's budget for an occasional indulgence, like a $50 bottle of wine."

They've been at it for a decade, and they're getting close to the payoff.

Luxury product, hard work

On a sunny morning in February, the Koerners have towed a small boat to a lake in a suburban neighborhood east of Cincinnati. A quiet trolling motor takes them out onto the water. It's unseasonably warm, but they're dressed for getting wet, in boots and fleece and bright yellow fishing pants that reflect on the still surface of the lake. "Normally, it's 33 degrees and snowing when we do this," said Renee.

Caviar may sound glamorous. Producing it isn't.

Keith has taken several days off his regular job to help with harvest season. Big Fish Farms is mostly Renee's baby, but this takes two people. In the past, Renee has stocked other lakes with young paddlefish and bought mature females that she' s made smallish amounts of caviar from. But this is the first time they're harvesting a lake they've stocked themselves with small fry that Renee raised from eggs 10 years ago.

This is the time of year that eggs are at the right stage, filled out but still firm. There's no chance that the females will lay their eggs before they can be harvested. They need a gravel bottom and running water before they'll lay them, and Ohio lakes have neither. But timing still matters, because once temperatures climb, the eggs soften and are reabsorbed into the body. "You need to get the eggs before the redbud blooms," said Renee.

Every possible problem in caviar ranching seems to be ingeniously solved by nature. Paddlefish are ancient, 50 million years older than dinosaurs. They have cartilage instead of bones. Their reproductive strategy isn't sophisticated: they just make a lot of eggs so a few will become fish. So one female can have 2 pounds of potential caviar, or up to 10 or more in old fish. Native to the Mississippi River Valley, they don't upset a local lake ecosystem. As they constantly swim, they use their long nose paddles to find abundant zooplankton.

"This is the only sustainable fishery," said Keith. That seems like an exaggeration, but unlike any other fish farming operation, they don't have to supply their fish any food once they're released into lakes, and they don't affect other fish. Most sturgeon caviar now comes from farms where sturgeon is raised in tanks and fed for 10 years. Ranching is more sustainable than catching paddlefish in the rivers, where stocks are also dwindling from overfishing. Big Fish Farms has gotten a "Right Bite" sustainable seafood seal of approval from Shedd Aquarium in Chicago.

The sport fishing way of catching paddlefish in the river is to use multi-prong hooks that snag the fish in the side. Though "caviar rancher" evokes an image of roping big fish with lassos, they actually use nets. Renee lets out 200 feet of net from the shore out to the middle of the lake. She's doing the grunt work today, while Keith steers the boat.

The nets have 10-inch openings, which catch large paddlefish, but not bass or most other fish. And no one fishing for the usual lake fish will accidentally catch one. They aren't interested in anything dangling from a hook and line, and in Ohio, it's illegal to snag them.

Usually, it takes about an hour and a half to set all the nets, then go from one to the other, pulling out the fish. "They go almost limp," said Rene. "They don't have much fight in them."  But the harvest from this lake, on this day, was disappointing. That clear water surface tends to spook the fish. Over four days, they netted about 10 females. They put them in a holding tank with oxygen-enriched water and drove them back to Bethel, where they can keep them short-term in a farm pond.

Turning eggs to gold 

From the outside, the Big Fish Farms caviar processing facility looks like any farm outbuilding. Inside it's dazzlingly white and clean. In one room, big fish hang from hooks like trophies.

A caviar-processing day starts with a ceremonial nip of Russian vodka. And Renee likes to take a minute to anoint each fish with vodka before cutting their notocord, a primitive spinal cord. "I've been laughed at for that--they don't really even have a nervous system," she said. But a female does have to die to give up her eggs.

The long slice that lays open the side of the fish is the most dramatic moment in this process, bringing gasps from onlookers. Inside the fish's belly, packed in, is nothing but dark gray eggs, a million potential paddlefish, or, in a 10-year-old fish, 2-3 pounds of soon-to-be caviar.

It's a simple recipe: take fish eggs, add salt. But how it's done matters. The careful washing and straining of the eggs. The type of salt, the amount, how carefully it's incorporated. Caviar is harvested in the late winter or early spring, but sold largely at the holidays, so the Koerners have bought a caviar refrigerator that keeps it at optimum temperature from this winter to next.

"We take 15 more steps from egg to egg," said Renee. To her, the important ones are how and where the fish are raised and harvested. "They say wine is made in the vineyard," she said.

By the way, the paddlefish meat isn't wasted. It's delicious, with a meaty texture and extremely mild flavor. In season, several chefs have it on the menu. It's on the menu at Bouquet and JR's Table.

The caviar is on the menu at L Restaurant, served with a Champagne-poached egg, and tradtional blini, little pancakes. There's Petrossian's osetra for $170 per ounce, or Big Fish Farms, for $60. Maitre d' and co-owner with Jean-Robert de Cavel Richard Brown says both have been surprisingly popular, and Big Fish Farms has held its own. "It's one the things I have the most trouble keeping in stock," he said.

Though this is a retirement scheme, Renee and Keith are aware that doing it all themselves is a young person's job. Hauling up thousands of heavy fish in Cincinnati winters, wrestling with wet nets and tanks of water, and babysitting tiny fish in the garage is probably not something they'll do through their 70s. But the plan is not to have to. "In five to seven years, we'll be dealing in tons of caviar," said Renee.

They harvested 50 females this year. "Next year, it will be 500," she said.

Here's the math: At $60 per 50 grams retail, an average female's 2 pounds of eggs are worth about $1,100. Not to give away all their secrets, but they currently have more than 1,000 acres stocked. Just one of their lakes has 9,000 fish.

"I would like to see this become a transformative product," said Renee. "People think 'Caviar in the Midwest?' But it's a true Midwestern product. No one used to be doing good wine in California. Now everyone is. It would be so exciting to be part of putting this product on the culinary map."  ​