Everywhere you buy caviar or roe, you’re likely to receive the same warning: Never eat your caviar off a metal spoon. At first, we dismissed this as a gimmicky way for retailers to get consumers to buy their special mother-of-pearl spoons. But we were curious enough to see whether the material of the spoon really mattered. So we tried eating white sturgeon caviar from plastic, mother-of-pearl, silver, and stainless-steel spoons.
The results were surprising. Caviar eaten off the plastic, mother-of-pearl, and stainless-steel spoons tasted perfectly good. But caviar eaten off the silver spoon tasted terrible—acrid, metallic, and acidic.
