Today we want to talk to you about the bottarga, a delicacy given to us by the sea and aknowledged by man, who was able to recognize and work it, starting from the first matter which this product comes from: the mullet’s eggs.

In fact, the bottarga is essentially made of thousands of eggs produced by the female mullet (Mugil cephalus, a fish that is also called foxlike mullet), which are salted, compressed and dried.

The mullet is the only species endowed with a shell for the eggs (ovarian sac) that is resistant to the rubbing treatment with salt. In fact the sacs, after having been extracted from the fish, are treated in this way for their ripening.

The origin of the product seems to date back even to the Phoenicians, but the word bottarga seems to derive from the arabian butarikh (“salted fish eggs”).

This delicacy is produced in different parts of the world, but the rarest one comes from Sardinia and you can recognize it from its amber colour, which is similar to the old gold’s hue. The most important production points in Sardinia are the area around Oristano, the Gulf of Cagliari, the Ogliastra and the Sarrabus areas.

You can taste the peculiar fragrance of the bottarga in different ways: it is delicious if you grate it on your spaghetti or cut it into thin slices with selleri as an appetizer or even as a tasty addition on the main courses.

We also remind you that the bottarga has got a definite flavour that bears the taste of the sea and the millenary genuineness of an ancient working, handed on from generation to generation: you can appreciate it not always at the first taste.

In any case we advice you to make the experience of tasting it (for those ones who still do not know it), perhaps in Sardinia, while sitting completely relaxed at a nice restaurant by the sea, in front of a dish of spaghetti!!

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 12th, 2007 at 10:39 am and is filed under italian cooking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.