Making pike caviar

I whipped up a bunch of pike caviar this morning.  It tastes great!  I regret all the fish eggs I have thrown away over the years, and want to try making caviar from other kinds of fish, such as kokanee, lake trout, and perch.  (Edit 10/22/18:  since I posted this explanation of how to make caviar, I've made caviar from lake whitefish, kokanee, lake trout, and perch eggs.  They all taste really good, but I prefer the texture of caviar made from larger eggs such as lake trout and kokanee, as you can feel them pop in your mouth.) 

For an authoritative explanation of how to make caviar, see http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=2ahUKEwje59DG9JveAhWVOn0KHW7rAKUQFjAAegQICBAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fcespubs.uaf.edu%2Findex.php%2Fdownload_file%2F1380%2F&usg=AOvVaw227DKRZONr2x4OABGWW7CT.  The first step is to catch a fish which contains eggs shortly before spawning time, so the eggs will be big and ripe.  For example, pike and perch spawn in the spring; Kokanee, lake trout, and lake whitefish spawn in the fall. The picture below is a 37 inch, 13.5 pound pike which a friend caught yesterday while ice fishing, which was plump and full of eggs. 

Then you have to carefully remove the skeins (membranes) of eggs from the fish and get them on ice.  When you get home, rinse off the skeins, remove the eggs from the skeins, rinse the eggs repeatedly in a bowl to get rid of any remaining goobers of skein, drain off the water in a sieve, soak the eggs in a saturated salt brine for about half an hour until they reach the level of saltiness you like, drain off the brine in a sieve, and rinse off the eggs.  If the eggs got saltier than you prefer, rinse them off again to reduce their saltiness.  Then put them in clean canning jars and refrigerate them.  You should eat the caviar within a week or two.

The hardest part of making caviar is removing the eggs from the skiens, which is a finicky process.  Think of the skein as a woman's nylon stocking full of BBs.  I put a skien of eggs on a plate and start gently scraping the eggs out of the skein with the edge of a spoon. Start at one end of the skein and scrape out the eggs.  Periodically scrape the eggs off the plate into a bowl.  When a section of the skein is empty, cut it off with scissors or a knife and start scraping eggs out of the next section of the skein.

To make a saturated salt brine, put one part of non-iodized pickling salt in four parts of water.  For example, half a cup of salt in two cups of water, or any multiple of those quantities.  If some of the salt won't dissolve despite repeated stirring, you can add some water until almost all of the salt has dissolved.

Caviar is great on crackers, with crackers topped with cream cheese or brie, on halved hard-boiled eggs, or on cucumber slices, and there are many recipes which use caviar.  When you offer caviar to people who have never eaten it before, a lot of them respond like you suggested that they eat earthworms.  But it's really tasty, and if you persuade them to try it, many get hooked.

I found some caviar for sale at a local deli. Wow, that stuff is expensive! If you do an internet search for caviar for sale, you'll discover some pretty expensive fish eggs.  I wonder what the pike caviar I made last week is worth? Making your own caviar is like printing your own money!

Here's some pictures I took while making lake trout caviar last night.  Lake trout eggs are a lot bigger than pike, perch, or lake whitefish eggs.  Lake trout eggs are about the same size as kokanee eggs, but you get a lot more eggs out of a good-sized lake trout than you do out of a kokanee.