In this installment
Ortiz Tuna
Smoked Mussels
Cod Stuffed Piquillo Peppers
Ortiz Tuna
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.
Smoked Mussels
The fourth-generation fishing family of Antonio Pérez Lafuente has been farming mussels off the coast of Galicia, Spain for around half a century. Using wooden floating frames, they hang long ropes with mussels attached down into the sea. The mussels grow on their own, filtering and cleaning the seawater around them. Once they are harvested and brought to shore, they’re steamed, smoked, removed from the shell and tinned in olive oil to preserve the texture and flavor.
Crack open the tin and serve with crusty bread and some nuts, or toss with pasta for a true taste of the sea. Sustainable and delicious.
Cod Stuffed Piquillo Peppers
I’m a fan of almost anything stuffed inside of a piquillo pepper—so when I found these cod-stuffed peppers I was darn excited. Piquillos, if you haven’t met them before, are the prince of roasted peppers, grown in the Navarre valley in northern Spain, roasted over beech wood and hand peeled with no water or oil ever added.
If you’ve ever tried to roast and hand peel your own peppers, shredding them and leaving tons of burnt pieces attached, you’d never believe it could be done. I didn’t, until I visited El Navarrico, our stuffed piquillo maker, and saw it before my own eyes. Amazing! Six women standing side by side peeling peppers faster than you’d peel an orange!
Piquillo flavor beats any other roasted pepper, and their flavor is strong enough to handle being stuffed and sauced. Here the stuffing is salt-cured cod, soaked and cooked to silky smoothness and the sauce is a simple rustic tomato sauce.
A stellar tapa, all you need to do to make the room swoon is crack open a tin and set it on the table.