Caviar in the Midwest? Yes, and it's sustainable

CINCINNATI — Renee and Keith Koerner have sunk their retirement portfolio deep: It's 5 to 20 feet under the surface of southwest Ohio 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 10 years to produce a salable product.

But when this fish 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.

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The Ohio River has had paddlefish for longer than people have been living on its banks. Fossil records in general date as far back as 400 million years ago, according to the Ohio River Foundation.

And the roe, the eggs that become caviar, inside the females has been treated as a commodity — overfished so much that half the states where they are found list the species as endangered, threatened or of special concern. A fisherman who catches one on the Ohio River has to release it because of its threatened-species status.

Renee Koerner, with a background in wine and fine dining, is taking extra care with her farm-raised paddlefish, making an artisanal product that she hopes will rival the quality of Russian caviar, which comes from sturgeons so overfished that its price is out of reach.

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"We're creating an industry," Renee Koerner said. She thinks of it like wine, which she has served and sold throughout her career in fine dining as maitre d' at Maisonette, a Cincinnati five-star restaurant institution that closed in 2005 after 56 years, and as a rep for Vintner Select wines. The differences in some kinds of fermented grape juice and others are vast.

"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 towed a small boat to a lake in a suburban neighborhood east of Cincinnati. A quiet trolling motor takes them out onto the water.

The weather is 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," Renee Koerner said.

Caviar may sound glamorous. Producing it isn't.

Keith Koerner has taken several days off his regular job to help with harvest season. Big Fish Farms is mostly his wife's baby, but this takes two people.

In the past, Renee Koerner has stocked other lakes with young paddlefish and bought mature females from which she has harvested smallish amounts of roe. But this is the first time they're harvesting a lake they've stocked themselves with small fry that she raised from eggs 10 years ago.

This is the time of year that eggs are at the right stage, filled out but still firm. The females have no chance of laying their eggs before they can be harvested.

Female paddlefish need a gravel bottom and running water before they'll lay eggs, and Ohio lakes have neither.

But timing still matters. Once temperatures climb, the eggs soften and are reabsorbed into the body.

"You need to get the eggs before the redbud blooms," Renee Koerner said.

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Nature seems to ingeniously solve every possible problem in caviar ranching. 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 pounds or more pounds in an older 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," Keith Koerner said. That seems like an exaggeration, but unlike in any other fish farming operation, the Koerners 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 are 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.

The Koerners' 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 a 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 Koerner lets out 200 feet of net from the shore to the middle of the lake. She's doing the grunt work today, while her husband 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.

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They aren't interested in anything dangling from a hook and line, and in Ohio, it's illegal to snag them because they are a threatened species.

Usually, the Koerners need about an hour and a half to set all the nets, then they go from one to the other pulling out the fish.

"They go almost limp," Rene Koerner said. "They don't have much fight in them."

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On this day, the harvest from this lake was disappointing. The clear surface water 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, Ohio, about 30 miles east of Cincinnati, 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, paddlefish hang from hooks like trophies.

A caviar-processing day starts with a ceremonial nip of Russian vodka. And Renee Koerner 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, in a 10-year-old fish, that's 2 to 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," Renee Koerner said. To her, the important ones are how and where the fish are raised and harvested.

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"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 Cincinnati-area chefs have it on the menu.

The caviar is on the menu at L Restaurant, served with a Champagne-poached egg, and tradtional blini, little pancakes. Diners can chose from Petrossian's osetra sturgeon caviar for $170 an ounce, or Big Fish Farms for $60. Maitre d'hôtel Richard Brown, who owns the restaurant with Jean-Robert de Cavel, said 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, the Koerners 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," Renee Koerner said. They harvested 50 females this year.

"Next year, it will be 500," she said.

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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 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," Renee Koerner said. "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."

Follow Polly Campbell on Twitter: @BeingPolly