What is Caviar Malosol? Is it the same as Lightly Salted Caviar?
Depending on the language you speak that phrase might either be self explanatory or confusing. Caviar is fish roe, that’s the easy part. The meaning of malosol is what might be confusing, but it’s actually a lot simpler than it sounds. It is simply a Russian word meaning little salt. To make it clear Caviar Malosol is Little salted caviar.
Depending on who and where you’ve heard the word from it might have sounded or have been spelled a bit differently. The different spellings are malosol, malossol, malassol, and malasol which are simply a variation of the same word.
Malosol or little salt is a description of the preservation (also known as the curing) process that the fish roe have to be treated with in order to stay edible for a longer period of time. When caviar was initially discovered it took a while to perfect the process of preservation. Some of the famous preservatives of the time were salt and sugar, but no one would eat sweet caviar so salt emerged victorious. Now it was only a matter of the right consistency of salt and caviar and that’s where it gets a little tricky.
Caviar such as Beluga and Osetra are very difficult to source and since the fish is only found in limited and remote parts of the world that makes it a limited resource product. If you would also consider the transportation of goods of the day it could take months for caviar to make it from one part of the world to the other, then shelf time it spends at the store until it is finally sold, by then the unpreserved caviar would already perish. Fraudsters realized that they could over-salt the caviar and that would essentially make it last forever. Have you ever had salt go bad? Probably not. To make it edible again they would simply soak the over-salted caviar in water for a couple of hours then drain the water which would make it less salty and edible again. Adding too much salt had it’s downsides as the resulting caviar would significantly decline in taste and lose some of the fantastic characteristics caviar is known and valued for. By adding too little salt the caviar would go bad very quickly and producers would be losing on their potential gains.
Over time the process got perfected and the term malossol coined. Caviar malossol became known as caviar preserved in about 3 to 5 percent ratio of caviar to salt. So a 500g container of caviar malossol would comprise of about 480 grams of caviar and 20g salt +/- a couple grams. Caviar producers realized that this is the optimal amount of salt required to manufacture a high quality balanced and nutritious product with long enough shelf life and keep their customers happy.
We are a happy to let you know that all of our caviar is malossol. Our suppliers are highly competent in the preservation processes and are certified to the highest manufacturing standards.
We are proud to offer Beluga Caviar Malossol, Sevruga Caviar Malossol, Osetra Caviar Malossol, and other caviar which can be accessed by pressing the link at each of corresponding names or from the main menu above.
