Rizzoli Anchovies

Tinned fish might be having its biggest moment since Napoleon held the contest that created it.

Maybe you didn’t hear that tale? Back at the turn of the 1800s Napoleon issued a challenge and the winner was Nicolas Appert. The problem Nicolas solved was an MRE for the military. The winning idea was tinned food.

The first food to find its way into a tin was sardines.

For a couple of hundred years afterward sardines held a similar place of regard that followed most foods invented for military convenience: a source of cheap sustenance. The same went for many other fish that got tinned, like tuna. We never grew up thinking it was special.

But something has changed in the last decade. Tinned fish is popular. Coveted. Desired. There are the breathless headlines. There are restaurants putting it on menus, served straight from the tin. There are social media splurges. There are loads of new tinned fish brands popping up and sending us samples at Zingerman’s. What’s behind all of it?

Certainly flavor is part of it.

Tinned fish, when it’s good, is absolutely delicious. Is it heresy for me to say some fish tastes better in a tin? It’s not a stretch to say ham is better cured than fresh. I think tuna is too—when it’s done right. I’d much rather have a tin of Ortiz tuna than a seared slab of yellowfin.

Tourism has something to do with it too.

There are places where tinned fish has long been held in high regard, made to taste great. The European capitals of tinned fish, Portugal and Spain, are booming with visitors. There, tinned fish flourishes in window displays. It is listed on restaurant menus, often served straight from the can. It fills entire aisles in supermarkets. Many Americans have packed their suitcases with foreign fish finds and come home searching for more. And maybe they found Zingerman’s — I don’t count us out as one source of the surge. We’ve been pushing tinned fish as great eating for years.

But let’s not discount cuteness.

Tinned fish packaging can be adorable. It’s certainly one of the reasons I buy it when I travel. But here’s a little secret. Within the cute boxes, a lot of the different packages hold the same fish. There are not that many tinned fish factories. But there are a lot of tinned fish brands who put their name on the packaging. That’s because most of the factories are happy to let companies rebrand their product. We found out about that years ago and are guilty of it too. Sorry to burst your bubble, but Zingerman’s sardines are not tinned at Zingerman’s Cannery in Ann Arbor along the banks of the mighty Huron River. We work with a century old fish factory near Porto, Portugal. We use both their regular stock, and, once a year, we tin a selection of the fattest, best harvest for our Vintage Sardines.

It’s a cliché to say that anchovies get a bad rap. Everyone knows they’re polarizing—and most people avoid the pole altogether. The thing is, it’s not anchovies’ fault. It’s ours. Just-caught anchovies are universally delicious. It’s mis-steps taken to cure, prepare, store and serve that cause such ruin.

How to cure anchovies.

For months, in sea salt. The Maestro Salador oversees anchovy curing, cracking the salt barrels every week or two to check on the color, the smell and the texture of the fish inside. Sometimes salt is taken out and more is added. Sometimes a weight is placed on top to press out more liquid. It’s a craft like those I’ve seen at other traditional food makers, like aging cheese or smoking bacon, and like those crafts, at the best places, it’s usually plied by very serious people who’ve been doing the work for decades. When it’s done cheaply it’s rushed and the variations of seasonality and nature aren’t taken into account—and the fish suffers.

How to prepare anchovies.

With knives, not scissors. Filleted anchovies, the type we offer, get their their bones removed at the factory. When scissors are involved the bones are cut near the surface but part remains in the fish and the texture suffers. When that’s done with paring knives like at Ortiz and Rizzoli, our long-time anchovy suppliers, every pin bone is exhumed. All of this is done by hand and it’s three times slower to use knives instead of scissors, so the price is higher accordingly.

How to store anchovies.

In a refrigerator. Unlike tuna and sardines, both of which improve when stored in a tin at room temperature, anchovies get worse—mushier, saltier, less sweet. Refrigerating them slows this process. Almost all retailers and customers keep their anchovies on a room temperature shelf but they shouldn’t. It’s not a big deal to have them out of refrigeration for a few days or more, but in the long term, anchovies will be much better chilled. We store them in refrigeration at Zingerman’s and you should slip them in the fridge at home, too. After you open a jar or tin, top them up with oil so they’re always covered.

How to serve anchovies.

At room temperature. Take them out of your fridge fifteen minutes before you want to use them. Lay big, beautiful fillets like La Gran Anchoa on a plate and top with a bit of olive oil and maybe a twist of lemon. Slip some everyday fillets like Rizzoli onto an egg salad sandwich. Or, yes, put them on a pizza. Don’t throw the oil out! Make a salad dressing with it or use it to sauté onions for your next dish.

Sardines and anchovies are two foods that, at least in America, share a strange combination of fascination, scorn, passion and obscurity. Since you can go years without seeing an anchovy article or a sardine TV show thought I’d spend a little time explaining a bit about them.

Anchovies first.

The Mediterranean is the traditional— and generally, still the best—source of anchovies. There is no single “anchovy fish” to be found, but rather a series of aquatic relatives—anywhere from sixteen to upwards of one hundred—that make them recognizable to us as members of the same fishy family. Like any other “crop” the haul is subject to the vagaries of weather. At most a small boat might bring in fifteen tons. Other nights, with high winds, they come in with nothing. A fisherman’s yield can vary from year to year by a factor of ten. All of which contributes to the high cost of anchovies which are often two or three times as expensive as sardines.

The curing process is comparable to that of aged hams in that it’s basically the anchovy’s own juices that make it happen, with bacterial fermentation playing a bit of a supporting role. For most of human history this salt packing was the way that anchovies were sold. It’s only in the 19th century—with the advent of modern canning—that the industry introduced the idea of filleting and packing in olive oil. Still, even if they are sold in oil like most of ours, they were first cured in salt.

Onto sardines.

For centuries previous, people were catching, cleaning and salting sardines as others did anchovies. There are still salted sardines to be found. Chuck Prine, a 40 year sardine veteran, gives indirect credit to Napoleon for tinned sardines: “His troops were dying of starvation. He was offering rewards for anyone who could come up with a way to conserve food. A guy named Nicholas Appert took a fried fish, and, if you will put it in glass with olive oil, and sealed it. It lasted 35 or 40 days. That became the first canned sardine.”

Mediterranean sardine producers in Portugal, Spain, and France work with what are known as pilchards. These are fat, very flavorful fish, usually only three, four, or at most five to a can. While France pioneered
sardine curing, many consider Portugal to be the best source today.

Traditional cooking, the popular cooking of countries passed down through time, is the cooking of the poor because, let’s face it, there have been a lot more poor people than rich people in history. Traditional cooks figured out how to squeeze the last bit of flavor from the ham bone, to find flavor in foods they might have otherwise thrown away. Turns out this isn’t just good policy for thriftiness or the environment. It’s super tasty as well.

Parm bones

When you get to the end of a hunk of Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, don’t throw out the rind. Put it in a plastic bag and keep it in the freezer. Next time you’re making a slow-cooked pasta or rice dish, or a stew, add the “parm bone” to it. Like adding bones to bubbling broth it’ll disperse its flavor into the dish, melting slowly away. You can do this with any cheese whose rind isn’t waxed or coated.

Meat rinds

The same idea as parm bones, but add a rind—or chunk—of bacon, guanciale or prosciutto to cooking water for pasta or rice. It’ll add a lot of flavor to the dish. You can also eat the softened rind after the dish is ready. When the boiling is done you can dress the meat with olive oil, a bit of cheese and eat it as an appetizer.

Cooking water

Add a bit of pasta water to your pasta sauce and the starch that seeped out of it into the water will thicken up the sauce and add some flavor. Or with water that’s cooked some carrots or rehydrated mushrooms or somehow seen the benefit of touching tasty food — think about adding it to whatever else you’re cooking to pass its flavor along.

Jarred remains

Before you throw out the briney remains of a jar of food, take a taste. The vinegar and oil from a jar of sun dried tomatoes can make an amazing marinade. The olive oil in a tin of anchovies can add depth to a salad dressing, or the start of your next sauté.

Chicken bones and carrot peels

One of the best ways to add flavor to your cooking is to substitute broth for water. It’s super easy to make at home, too. Don’t buy ingredients for it. Just save your broth-worthy vegetable scraps like carrots, onion, celery and herb stems in a bag in the freezer. One day, when you eat some chicken, throw the bones in a pot with those scraps, some bay leaves and peppercorns, and cover it with water. Let it simmer for a few hours, strain it, then pour into ice cube trays. When you need your next dose of flavor, crack out a cube and melt it into a dish.