In this Installment
Yellowfin Tuna in Olive Oil from Amalfi Coast, Italy
Back at the beginning of November, 2023, I got the chance to get back to Italy after a very long time (I’m sure you can guess why). But I was able to finagle a week long tour of producers with my friends Rolando Beramendi and Jeff Bergman, both from the importing company Manicaretti. This tuna is one of the items I found in the fall and I’m happy to share it with you now!
Our trip started in Rome. We took the train up to the Sabine Hills to visit Il Colle del Gusto, then we left Rome and took the train to Salerno, a port city on the Amalfi Coast a couple hours south of Naples. Pompei is halfway between the two cities and during the summer months the area is filled with tourists and beachgoers since the Amalfi Coast is one of the most picturesque, raw, rocky, beautiful places I’ve ever seen. The two lane road that runs along the cliffside is so narrow you have to wait for buses and larger vehicles to slink past before venturing forward. The towns are carved out of the mountainside—or at least they seem that way.
But that’s heading along the coast. Salerno is a bit larger and has a rather busy port. Ships come up from Sicily at night, pick up cargo then head to Sardinia before heading for other ports in the Mediterranean. It’s been an important port city for centuries, and it’s from here that local fishermen head out during the Yellowfin tuna season (April through September) to line catch fish and bring it right back to port to be cooked and (in the case of IASA) tinned. At least that’s how it’s been happening since 1969 when IASA was founded by Francesco di Mauro, a former Navy officer that had a few ideas about the best ways of preserving the bounty of the sea. His adult children run the company today. Vincenzo focuses on production, Salvatore handles distribution and Lucia—the youngest and only woman—leads sales and marketing as well as exports.
(She’s the visionary. Lucia charms everyone in the room with her ever present laugh and warm smile. She’s the type of person that laughs when she makes a mistake instead of chastizing herself. Rolando told me Lucia and I would hit it off and boy was he right. We were instant friends and even shot some tasting videos for social media—when we could contain our laughter for long enough.)
Back to the fish. When the tuna are in season, IASA takes the fish to their factory where the whole fish is steamed in large (6 feet in diameter) and long steam ovens. They look like long steel tubes that run half the length of the building. The fish are loaded into metal baskets on trollies that are rolled into the steamers.
“My father was the first in this area to do this technique,” Lucia told me. “It’s a better way to cook the fish because it’s more even and doesn’t hurt the meat of the fish.”
After the cooked tuna has cooled, it’s trimmed, cut to size, and hand packed into tins and jars…usually in olive oil but sometimes in brine or sauce.
All the work is done by hand and all the workers are women. I’ve noticed this before in the factories of Ortiz in Spain. 99% of the workers are women and they spend long hours doing miniscule handy work—and they do it quickly.
I asked Lucia why it was that women always seem to work in canneries like this and she had a pretty good theory. It’s basically the same thing my friend Maria from Ortiz told me and it boils down to being a fisherman’s wife. Traditionally, the men were (and basically still are) the ones in the boats. They were gone for long periods of time trying to catch enough fish to feed their family and make some money. While they were out to sea, the women back at home had to run everything else. They took care of the kids, they managed the fish sales, they kept the home and ran the business. And to their credit, when the men returned to shore they didn’t try to take over and tell their wives what to do. On the contrary. On terra firma, the women ran the show. The men were the kings of their little domains on the water, but when they were home they took orders from the person in charge: the fisherman’s wife.
It’s a universal thing, apparently. So much so there’s even a tinned fish company called Fishwife for basically the same reason. (Their packaging is awesome, by the way.)
IASA makes other preserved fish products, too, like anchovies and their traditional by-product “colatura,” but that’s for another club.
To my mind, this is the first Italian tinned tuna we’ve sold in more than twenty years. This fish is a different species than the “Bonito del Norte” tuna that Ortiz fishes out of the Atlantic, and its flavor and texture reflects that. It’s toothsome, rich, with a nice meaty flavor made even more so by being tinned in oil. I’m not sure what alchemy occurs, but it seems to enhance the fish’s flavor, not dilute or overpower it.
You can eat it straight from the tin if that’s your thing. I do. I also toss the whole tin—oil and all—with just cooked pasta and chunks of parmigianio-reggiano and some olives for good measure. I wouldn’t turn it into tuna salad because it’s so flavorful. Instead, try putting the unopened tin in a pot of boiling water for a few minutes to heat the fish, then carefully remove it from the water, carefully open the tin, and serve over a bed of rice with a squeeze of lemon and a crack of black pepper. Instant and impressive!
Dill Pickle Sprouted Almonds & Pepitas from Tennessee, America
Have you heard of this term before? ‘Sprouted’? I first heard the term years ago when a friend was starting to make bread from sprouted grains. That was a big deal at the time (and today) because a lot of folks were dealing with sensitivities to wheat and thinking they may be suffering from celiac disease. In the end, far fewer folks actually suffered from celiac than the self-diagnosis might have claimed, but many people realized there are more than a few health benefits associated with sprouted grains.
In short: sprouting grains makes their nutrients more accessible to digest and use. You can sprout a grain, seed, nut by soaking it in water for a short amount of time. This tricks the grain/nut into thinking it’s time to sprout and grow into a plant, so its own chemical make-up starts to change. It sheds phytic acid, which can interfere with human digestion. With the phytic acid gone, nutrients are better absorbed into the body. Once they arrest the sprouting, they dehydrate the nuts to give them a super-sized crunch by removing any water left in the nut.
We’ve been offering their Cherry Berry Nut Medely for a while now, but there’s something about this Dill Pickle blend that has caught my attention. Dill is a trickly flavor, but when it’s well balanced like it is with these almonds and pumpkin seeds (pepitas), it’s bright and a little savory and a little sweet and it sort of makes your mouth salivate and want more. At least that’s how I’ve come to feel about these crunchy beauties. They’re especially nice served along side cheese and salami on a cheeseboard. They’re just this side of exotic so people gobble them up!