Salmon Caviar Recipes

Simple-To-Make, All-Star Dishes With Red Caviar

Hors d’Oeuvres

Red caviar makes hors d’oeuvres exciting.

• For a luxurious treat, roll a spoonful of cream cheese or goat cheese in a strip of smoked salmon and top with red caviar. This concept can be expanded as a first course, using shrimp, crab or lobster salad instead of the cheese (salad will fall out of the rollup in a finger food—it needs to be confined to plated foods).
• Fill endive leaves with a dab of crème fraîche and red caviar.

 Salmon rolls can be filled with cream cheese or goat cheese and topped with caviar as an hors d’oeuvre, or filled with shrimp, crab or lobster salad plus caviar as a first course.

• Fill miniature pastry cups with red caviar, as shown below.

• If you can’t find pastry cups, it’s easy to cover fresh French bread with sweet butter or crème fraîche.  You can also serve the caviar on cocktail toast or blini.

First Courses

Whatever you’re planning to serve, red caviar works as a colorful plate garnish: You can scatter some beads across the plate, or add a spoonful to an endive leaf.

• Top a trio of seared scallops with a dab of creme fraîche and some red caviar.
• Right before serving, add a spoonful to a vegetable- or fish-based soup. Instead of adding the caviar directly to the soup, you can toast a piece of baguette as a crouton, add the caviar, and float the crouton on the top of the soup.
• Or, if you’re patient, you can tease the caviar into the shape of a heart, as we did in the photo below.

Main Courses

Red caviar can accent any fish or seafood dish.

• It’s easy to add a spoonful to the top of the fish.
• Or, sprinkle the beads in the sauce, as shown at the right.
• You don’t need to serve a sauce—just sprinkle the beads on a bare plate. It’s equally glamorous and saves calories, too.
• The pasta dish, below, couldn’t be sexier: black (squid ink) linguine in a light cream sauce dotted with red caviar. The linguine is accented with shrimp and lobster claw meat, and the plate is garnished with fresh basil, thyme and edible flower petals. Although it looks like a chef spent hours in its creation, it’s a very simple dish: The most complex part is the sauce (and you can purchase a cream sauce or Alfredo sauce, then add a tablespoon of Cognac).
• You can also make a simple pasta dish by tossing cooked angel hair or another thin, long cut with butter to lightly coat the pasta, plating the pasta, and then adding the caviar. Garnish with snipped dill, chives or basil.
• In addition to the red jacket potato idea at the top of this page, red caviar can be added to almost any potato preparation—for instance, to make “polka dot” mashed potatoes, or as a “surprise,” in a baked potato underneath a topping of sour cream.

Roasted salmon on a bed of basil mashed potatoes with a saffron mousseline sauce and red caviar.

Black linguine with lobster, shrimp and red caviar in a cream sauce. Decorate the plate with edible flower petals.

More ideas? The only limits are your imagination and your budget.