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A mouth-watering caviar pizza (löjrom pizza) made with seaweed-infused flatbreads, topped with a delicate white cheese sauce and bejewelled with intensely rich and briny löjrom caviar. This is an easy-to-make-at-home caviar pizza recipe that brings the classic comfort of a traditional pizza but adds a touch of luxury and opulence normally associated with high-end cuisine.
This caviar pizza recipe shows you how to incorporate the elegance and sophistication of “caviar” into a beloved comfort food without breaking the bank. We still use the traditional garnishes of sour cream, red onion and dill to appease the caviar purists yet at the same time create a unique culinary experience that even the most gourmet-seeking glitterati would glutton on in the trendiest of restaurants.
Caviar pizza - inspired by Sweden
This version of a caviar pizza is inspired by Stockholm, Sweden where it became a craze in many of the most popular dining destinations in the city.
The country produces one of the tastiest varieties of caviar in the world. An area called Kalix in Norrbotten harvests the eggs from a salmonid variety of fish called vendace (Coregonus albula) found in the Bothnian Bay archipelago in the Baltic Sea in Northern Sweden. Löjrom, or bleak roe as it is known in the UK, is a prized delicacy with sweet, umami and robust saline nuances. The eggs themselves are very fine and small with a delicious taste and texture with the pearls often bursting releasing subtle flavours akin to sea vegetables. They have a dazzling amber colour and highlight many of the dishes they accompany such as skagenröra, a Swedish shrimp salad for example, but they are best enjoyed as the main event themselves, served with finely diced onion and sour cream, and dolloped on a blini or well buttered slither of toast.
This traditional way the Swedish eat Kalix löjrom is also very similar to the way Beluga, Ossetra or Sevruga caviar is eaten. So to create a larger base for which to enjoy some caviar such as a pizza base rather than a little blini is a logical adaptation to serve with this delicacy. Beluga, Ossetra and Sevruga caviar come from rare sturgeon fish native to the Caspian Sea and are ultimate luxury food items that come with a hefty price tag. Kalix löjrom is a fraction of the price yet still a luxury item, which is why it is such a great ingredient and well worth hunting out. Online Scandinavian shops are a good place to look.
Different caviar varieties
The different flavours that fish roe impart are all unique yet do share a thread, so using different varieties still works for this recipe. The finest caviars such as beluga exude a rich nuttiness and are completely free from fish odour, Sevruga, the olive green roe is intense with notes of the sea and seaweed. Kalix löjrom is subtle and intense at the same time depending on how much you put in your mouth. It's the perfect ingredient to create a seafood pizza. Often served with sour cream, a subtle cheese béchamel sauce as an addition pairs very well too and reminds you that this is a fusion of pizza and classic caviar. A pizza bianco, or pizza with a white sauce rather than tomato base with caviar just makes sense.
Other fish roe and fish roe products can also be used as not only do they totally look the part, but they also have salty seaweed and buttery flavours. Lumpfish caviar for example, although not technically a caviar (even though it is marketed as such) is also rich in umami, has a short saltiness and with fine pearls that burst or even crunch with flavour, it is in fact a great economically viable substitution that will also yield a beautiful looking and tasting pizza. Also, look out for salmon roe (keta) which are large orange pearls with a buttery flavour or trout roe, which is also golden in colour, and finer in texture but delivers a bigger salty hit as well as a delicate fish flavour. There are amazing Japanese products too such as massage which is a fine fish roe that is used to garnish sushi and tobiko, which is roe from the Japanese flying fish. If you want to create an even more unique flavour to your caviar pizza, tobiko can take on flavours around it, green tobiko is infused with wasabi for example, and black tobiko exhibits a nutty flavour from squid ink with other varieties flavoured with chilli, or citrus fruits which will enhance a pizza or give it a fusion of your liking.
No matter how much you spend on your caviar, this caviar pizza recipe is a perfect way to showcase it.
Caviar pizza made with homemade flatbreads
Rather than making a pizza base with yeast, we make a flatbread with flour, yoghurt and nori seaweed flakes to give the base a blini-esque flavour and texture to the pizza. The nori adds another dimension of the sea to the overall flavour too as well as giving it an attractive colour. We have also crept a little kombu stock into a classic white sauce and added some delicate cheese in the form of grated emmental. The flavour is slightly nutty too, as going by the flavour profile of a good caviar, this works well. Once the bases are made, simply spread the white sauce over and bake in a hot oven for a few minutes until slightly gratinated. Simply dollop generous amounts of caviar over the top interspersed with spoonfuls of sour cream and scattered with fresh finely chopped red onion and dill and eat straight away.
Impressive pizza recipe - perfect for sharing and dinner parties
This pizza can be as indulgent as you like and is especially great for dinner parties. One of the reasons that I love this recipe is when I think back to the first time I was introduced to löjrom.
A chef friend “couple” of ours invited us around for dinner. As the head chef of a prominent Stockholm restaurant, I had silent yet high expectations of how the evening would go. The starter, I was informed was löjrom. At this point in my life, I had not been introduced to this before, and for financial reasons, I had no personal experience of caviar either so when I was educated as to what löjrom was, I had nothing to compare it to in my head.
To be honest, I had never seen anything exciting being done to caviar either, and at the price point it was, I couldn’t help thinking that it was very much a delicacy for Russian oligarchs and a means of maintaining a divide between the haves and have nots. I wasn’t exactly salivating at the mention of it, especially when it was proclaimed that it would be served with stale tortilla bread, raw onion and sour cream.
As a foodie, I like to dress my food up, and as a guest of a head chef, I was expecting some kind of aesthetic effort on his behalf too.
So, when a Tupperware container with a sticker on it with typewritten 'löjrom' followed by a serial number appeared along with a bowl of finely chopped red onions and a bowl of sour cream stirred with strands of cheese. I was slightly forlorn and thought to myself, tonight is just not going to be one of those nights, even chefs have the right to eat what they like after all, whether it be pot noodles, beans on toast or fish eggs with stale bread.
The mood was light and the conversation was easy because my expectation had given in altogether. We were having fun! and I just watched out of curiosity (as I did still need to be schooled in how to consume the löjrom) as my friends, and especially my partner, scooped, spread, dolloped and shoved decadent amounts of caviar into their mouths.
Well, it was my turn, so I copied the rest. I too, spread some of the soured cream that was subtly flavoured with mild cheese onto a triangle of stale flour tortilla. The bread was still floury to the touch but just strong enough to take the weight of the sour cream without being brittle enough to break. I dolloped spoonfuls of the glittering amber Löjrom on top followed by a scattering of perfectly small equal-sized pieces of red onion, Looking at my presentation, I suddenly thought it looked great, and less apprehensively took a bite. Then something happened.
It was just like that moment in Ratatouille when Anton Ego (the food critic in the film) complacently digs into a plate of ratatouille made by Remy the rat, so sure of how he is to critique the dish, to only be suddenly transported back into his childhood home faced with his mother who has delivered the exact same dish as a means to comfort him.
Obviously, I was not transported back to somewhere where I had been before, I’d never tasted Löjrom, but I was transported somewhere and was noticeably absent from the table I was at.
Now, looking back to that incredible dinner, I feel embarrassed by how naive I was but so incredibly thankful to have been introduced to löjrom. (the serial numbers by the way indicated that it had come from a seriously good quality and rare source)
It just goes to show what an incredible ingredient caviar is and how it can sing even though it hasn’t been dressed up.
With this caviar pizza, not only does the caviar sing, but it is in full fancy dress, accompanied by a whole choir of seaweed-infused flatbread, decadent cheese béchamel sauce and silky sour cream with an audience of red onion and dill. I really hope you will be asking for an encore!
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Caviar pizza recipe (löjrom pizza)
Ingredients
For the base (flatbread)
- 125g or ¾ of a cup of 00 flour
- 125 ml or ½ a cup of plain yoghurt
- 1 teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda
- ½ teaspoon of salt
- 1 tablespoon of nori seaweed flakes
For the béchamel sauce
- 2 tablespoon of butter
- 2 tablespoon of flour
- 250 ml or 1 cup of milk
- 1 tablespoon of kombu stock
- 125 g or 1 cup of grated Emmental cheese
Toppings
- 80 g of Kalix löjrom or caviar of choice, can be black or red
- 1 red onion, finely diced
- 12 g of dill fronds
- 125 ml of sour cream
Instructions
Pizza base/flatbreads
- Combine the flour, yoghurt, bicarbonate of soda, salt and nori seaweed flakes in a bowl and stir together to form a dough.
- On a floured surface knead the dough for 5-6 minutes to work the gluten adding a little bit of flour if the dough is too wet.
- Divide the dough into 2 equal pieces and roll them out to form 2 pizza bases measuring approximately 25cm in diameter.
- Put a heavy dry frying pan on a high heat and cook each pizza base for 1-2 minutes on each side or until lightly charred. Set aside.
White sauce
- Melt the butter in a pan on a medium heat and add the flour.
- Stir to cook out the flour. Add the milk and the kombu stock and whisk gradually until the sauce thickens.
- Add the cheese and stir until fully melted.
Build your pizzas
- Spoon equal amounts of the white sauce over each cooked flatbread and bake in a 200℃/392°F oven for 6-7 minutes until lightly gratinated.
- Arrange spoonfuls of cold caviar and sour cream over the pizzas and garnish with finely chopped red onion and dill fronds and serve immediately.
- Alternatively, serve the pizza in slices and present the caviar and garnishes in bowls on the side. Use pearl spoons if possible for the caviar.
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