Customizable 5 Tinned Fish Gift Box

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 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.

Nearly every great traditional food involves some amount of controlled decay. Wine, beer and cheese are the examples we’re perhaps most familiar with. These are foods whose raw ingredients have been fermented and curdled—decayed, essentially—under a watchful eye. The controlled rot turns them into something even more delicious. Can the same be done with fish?

The popular myth is that fresher is better no matter the fish, no matter how it’s served. But it’s not true.

While there’s nothing better to fry than a mess of bluegill caught that afternoon, when it comes to preserving fish a certain amount of time makes it taste better. Sushi, traditionally a way to preserve fish in Japan, is not improved by being ultra-fresh. Anyone who’s tried raw tuna right off the boat and thought it was totally bland knows there’s some magic that happens in the time after its caught and gets to the restaurant that expands its flavor.

Controlled decay is a key ingredient in tinned fish too.

Anchovies spend about a year stacked in salt before they’re ready to tin. The salt cures them much the same way it does prosciutto (Italian cured ham). And just as a mild, fresh ham becomes sweeter, richer and way more flavorful when it’s cured, so do anchovies. Trust me on this if you’ve only had bad anchovies—the good ones are amazing. Anchovies don’t improve once they’re tinned, however.

There are many kinds of seafood that get better with age.

The two that we’re working with a lot these days are line-caught tuna and sardines. They’re both wild, fatty fish that are cooked then packed in olive oil, not water. The olive oil interacts with the flesh over time in a way that reminds me of how great wine ages. The changes aren’t drastic, but they’re noticeable, especially over time. The edges of the flavor get softer. The mouthfeel becomes silkier. The experience of eating grows more complex. Try it for yourself – you’ll taste the difference.