Tin of Tinned Fish

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.

Take two tins of tuna: one from Ortiz, one typical of the supermarket. They came from the same animal living in the same ocean. One costs twice as much as the other. One smells like the sweet sea, peels off in thick blond chunks and tastes like a fancy dinner out. The other smells like harbor at low tide, spoons out in pulpy shreds and tastes like saltwater. What happened? Here’s the abbreviated tale in five acts.

1. Ortiz tuna is line-caught, not netted

Bonito tuna, a common species for tinning, are not big fish. Most are two feet long and weigh about ten pounds. They’re warm-blooded. Taken together that means any bruising or bleeding affects a large portion of each fish and muddies its flavor. That’s rare with Ortiz’s tuna since they are entirely line caught, classic fisherman style, one at a time on a rod. Bruising is much more common with netted fish—the most common way to catch tuna, where hundred-foot-long nets drag the tuna in a thrashing bundle up from the sea.

2. The fresh-caught tuna is stored in the boat’s hold on ice

A more conscientious captain will freight a lot of ice, enough to surround each fish so they don’t touch one another and cool down quickly. After all, no one knows how long they’ll be at sea or how much they’ll catch and the fish starts to deteriorate the moment it’s caught.

3. Ortiz tuna is cooled and chilled after cooking

Cooking canned tuna is more or less standardized: the fish is boiled in salted water for a couple hours. But what happens next is not at all the same from factory to factory. At Ortiz the just-cooked fish sits out to cool in the kitchen, then gets time to chill in cold storage. The two steps take hours and hog up space on the floor and in the refrigerators. Not all tuna makers choose to take them. Like most food makers who worry about price more than flavor, they cut time out of the equation. But what the extra time and care does is critical – it stops the fish from fermenting. Fermenting can be ruinous as a carbonation that makes the tins unsalable or it can be mild. Even mild fermentation has a flavor that, to my taste, is a sour tang that runs throughout most tins of cheap tuna and mars its sea-sweet origins.

4. Ortiz tuna is cleaned by hand

This is as labor-intensive as it sounds (if you’ve ever deboned and skinned cooked fish you know what I mean). It’s not at all standard practice in the tuna world. The women—and I can say from my experience visiting that 100% of the cleaners are women—work meticulously with paring knives, scraping and cleaning every bruise, every discoloration, every chance for the flavor to head south, leaving only pristine fish to find their way into the tin.

5. Only whole chunks of tuna and olive oil go into the Ortiz tin

That’s it. No flakes, no water. That’s the way you get great tinned tuna. Shredded smaller pieces deteriorate faster and that will show in the flavor. As for olive oil, well, the American tuna industry has pawned off water-packed tuna as healthier but what they failed to mention was that in losing 20% of the calories we lost 98% of the taste. Water leaches flavor from the fish. Ortiz only packs in olive oil, which amplifies the tuna’s flavor and gives it a silky, rich mouthfeel.

All these steps represent an added expense, in better ingredients, extra time, or additional effort. But the impact they make in the tuna’s appearance, aroma, flavor, and texture is unmissable. You really can taste the difference.

In the tinned fish world at Zingerman’s, Ortiz tuna is the belle of the ball. Each year we sell a boatload of it. It’s delicious, and it certainly merits all the attention it gets, but it’s not the only tinned fish in town. Portuguese sardines are equally delicious, though comparatively unsung.

Sardines were the original convenience food.

In the early 1800s, Pierre-Joseph Colin was the first person to can fish, and the first fish he canned was the sardine he grew up eating in Brittany, France. By 1836, his factory was producing about 30,000 tins per year. Every tin was made and packed by hand. Most of them were used to feed the French military. The soldiers used their bayonets or rocks to smash open the tins, since the can opener wouldn’t be invented for another twenty years.

For more than a century, tinned sardines dominated the market for quick, prepared convenience food. They filled workers’ lunch boxes and government pantries stocked up for bomb threats. In the middle of the 20th century, tinned sardines were the student’s equivalent of today’s ramen—cheap and quick food (and, unlike ramen, fairly nutritious). With the rise of TV dinners and other pre-made meals, sardines fell off their prominent perch. Their workaday reputation, though, has remained.

On the other side of the Atlantic, sardines are fancier fare.

In 1935, Oscar Wilde’s son started London’s first sardine tasting club. And Jose Carlos Capel, the food critic of Spain’s most widely circulated daily newspaper, once said, “In the larders of some European gourmets, tins of sardines in olive oil occupy a place of honour alongside pots of foie gras with truffles or jars of caviar. A cult has built up around these canned fish, which… constitute a kind of gastronomical religion.”

Perhaps no country loves its sardines more than Portugal. The Golden Book of Portuguese Tinned Fish from 1938 reported that “among the great variety of Portuguese tinned fish, the sardine occupies the most important place.” Lisbon is still a working fish port. Sardines account for a third of the fish brought in each year—a fact that’s even more remarkable when you consider that sardine season in Portugal is only six months long, from May to October.

You can get good tinned sardines from around the Mediterranean.

There are producers in Spain, France, and Portugal that all offer high quality fish. From these countries, the sardines are generally pilchards. What we call “sardines” can actually be any of a handful of different small fishes, including ones from the herring and sprat families. Pilchards are the fattest and most tender. Labeling laws require that any non-pilchard fish canned as “sardines” must include an identifying label on the inside of the tin.

Good Spanish and French sardines have a subtleness to them; Portuguese sardines tend to have a bit more of an edge. It could be described as being more briny, or just more intense. One Portuguese sardine afficionado I know described it as a “tsk tsk tsk”—a certain extra succulence she couldn’t quite put to words.

We get our Portuguese tinned sardines from the La Gondola cannery, packed under the label da Morgada. Many of the fishermen are the second generation to work for the company. They tin the sardines only during the sardine season with fresh, not frozen, fish. Each tin is still packed by hand, just like they did in France in 1836, with four or five fat fish nestled in olive oil (as pictured). We sell tins packed with pure olive oil and ones packed in extra virgin olive oil. Both are fantastic; the ones in extra virgin oil are a bit softer, rounder, more buttery. The sardines in pure olive oil are packaged in a handsome box designed by Zingerman’s artist Ryan Stiner.

Sardines packed in olive oil get better with age.

Just like aging cheeses or wines can produce more intense flavors, tinned sardines packed in olive oil that are aged for a few years—or even a few decades—can develop bigger flavors. Having a collection of vintage sardines may not be as flashy as having a cellar full of aging wines or a humidor filled with good cigars, but it can make for some very good eating. Starting a sardine collection is easy: just pick up a few tins, keep them somewhere cool and dry, and turn them every now and again so they age evenly. Make sure you’re using very good sardines since aging them will emphasize the flavors that are already there. Good sardines will get better while inferior sardines will taste increasingly mediocre.

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.