Bottarga di Muggine
What's for lunch? Spaghetti with Bottarga di Muggine.
Bottarga is made with dried salted eggs of muggine or cefalo "gray mullet".
Almost 3000 years ago the Phoenicians salted and dried grey mullet roe.
Anyway the bottarga is an ancient product of Ancient Egypt. You can see how to make the bottarga on the Egyptian paintings on tomb walls. The fishermen taked the egg sacks out of the gray mullet. Then the roe was extracted, cleaned, salted, pressed out any liquid, and dried. From Ancient Egypt this special technique was spread to other Mediterranean Countries.
Today Bottarga is produced in Israel, Australia, and Japan, but the best one is the bottarga di muggine from Sardinia, a luxury artisanal product, a real excellence.
So the Sardinian Bottarga is for us the Mediterranean Caviar.
To make the bottarga the roe/eggs is filleted and covered with sea salt for a few hours.
Later it is washed and dried in special furnaces at low temperature for some months!!!). It's sold in a whole piece in the refrigerator case of many seafood markets and grated with a cheese grater. The flavor of Bottarga is between that of a good quality of anchovies and caviar.
But the bottarga can be pressed and packed into glass jar.
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| Bottarga di Muggine - An Italian Excellence |
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| Spaghetti with Bottarga di Muggine |