Why You Should Be Eating More Tinned Fish

A few years ago, I conducted an extremely informal poll on my Instagram: “How do you feel about tinned fish?” I expected mostly polar reactions, but more than any of the other responses —  love it, hate it or indifferent — “tinned fish-curious, but unsure what to do with it” took the lead. For both our health and the health of the ocean, there are clear benefits to eating the small fish like sardines and mackerel that usually come in tins. What was less clear to people at the time was how to enjoy them.

Why You Should Think Small

NOAA estimates that Americans eat about 16 pounds of seafood every year, and 3.6 pounds of that comes from a can. Two-thirds of our collective canned seafood intake is tuna, with things like clam chowder and salmon making up another big chunk. Only a very small portion — just over .3 lbs — comes from small fish like sardines.

Think back to the food chain you learned about in elementary school: the sun feeds plankton, which feed tiny fish, which feed slightly larger fish, which eventually feed big fish like tuna. The catch is that only about ten percent of the energy in each level of the food chain gets transferred up, so that salmon or tuna on your plate had to eat a lot — about ten times its own weight — of smaller fish. This is pretty inefficient, and it means that there aren’t that many of those fish at the top of the food chain to begin with. Add poorly regulated fishing into the mix, and you get a serious danger of population collapse, just like the cod crisis in the 1990s.

Problems With Farmed Fish

Farming fish might seem like a better alternative, but it runs into the same problem. Farmed fish still need nutrients like omega-3s that they can only get from eating smaller fish. As a result, millions of tons of small fish are caught and turned into fish feed. Thanks to a transition to soy-based feed (which comes with its own sustainability concerns), farmed fish eat fewer small fish than they used to, but it still takes more than a pound of smaller fish to farm a pound of salmon.

But what about eating these smaller fish directly? Even if you’re catching the same amount of fish, skipping the last link on the food chain means you’re making a much lower impact on the ocean. Small fish stocks are more resistant to overfishing than those of bigger fish: for starters, there’s a lot more of them, and they grow and reproduce quickly. This means their populations recover much faster than a slow-growing fish like a tuna. The fact that herring, sardines, and anchovies school closely together also mean that it’s easy to use fishing methods that are fuel-efficient and don’t scoop up a lot of bycatch.

Anchovies

Because anchovies pack a lot of flavor in a small amount of meat, they have different uses from other small fish. Despite their reputation for pungency, anchovies are a surprisingly easy entry point into enjoying preserved fish. You might be unknowingly eating them already, since they’re widely used as a subtle, savory base for dishes that aren’t obviously fish-forward, like classic Caesar dressing. When warmed in oil, anchovies “melt” away and give a rich, salty layer of flavor that comes across as more meaty than fishy, like they do in this Caramelized Shallot Pasta.

If you’re ready for something more concentrated, anchovies are great as a topping for pizzas, toasts, and salads — anywhere they round out an acidic sauce or dressing. Any time you’ll be eating whole filets, the quality of the anchovies matters; a few extra dollars can guarantee there won’t be any off flavors or overwhelming saltiness. Rinsing the filets gently in water also helps take the bite out of the brine.

Sardines, Mackerel and Herring

Sardines, mackerel, and herring all have slightly different tastes. Sardines and herring are more assertive, while mackerel is milder and buttery, but they can all be used in similar ways. They come in many forms: whole or fileted, with or without skins, plain, smoked, in flavored oils or sauces.

Both whole fish and filets, especially those with flavoring, are a favorite on toast with some tomato, lemon and herbs. If you buy it skin-on, try crisping the fish on both sides in a very hot pan — since it’s already cooked, this only takes a minute, but it goes a long way in removing any “canned” taste and gives it a delicious, crackly exterior. Unless the fish are very large, you don’t need to remove any of the bones – the canning process makes them soft enough that they’re barely noticeable, plus they’re a great source of calcium.

If bones are a conceptual hurdle for you, it’s easy to find boneless and skinless filets. You’ll miss out on some of the calcium, but boneless fish work well in cold salads, where they add substance but still feel lighter than other proteins. Of course, you can also mix them with some mayonnaise and whatever fresh, acidic ingredients you like for a variant on the tuna salad-style sandwich. Or, for a nominally upscale experience, try smoked filets as a pate or rillette on chips or crackers.

Filets can be cooked into dishes, like the attached recipe for Rice Cooker Sardine Rice from Anna Hezel’s cookbook “Tin to Table,” but they tend to do best when they aren’t stirred much or otherwise cooked aggressively, since they can fall apart. They’re easy to add to pastas, curries and sauces, provided you add them towards the end of cooking and heat them gently. Folding them into a hot dish after cooking is usually more than enough to heat them through.

Recipe: Rice Cooker Sardine Rice with Grated Ginger, Sweet Corn & Green Onions

From Tin to Table, by Anna Hezel
Recipe by Naoko Takei Moore
Serves 2

After interviewing Naoko Takei Moore for TASTE a few years ago, I became a quick convert to cooking with donabe, clay pots that have been part of Japan’s culinary history for centuries. Naoko’s business, TOIRO, sells a variety of donabe, and her book, Donabe, shares some of the joys and rituals of preparing and sharing meals in clay. One of the first dishes I cooked with my kamado-san (rice cooker) donabe was one that Naoko posted on Instagram—a fluffy bed of rice cooked in dashi, soy sauce, and sake, under a sunburst of tiny silver sardines. The sardine oil coats each grain of rice, seasoning it and creating a toasty golden crust where it meets the clay surface. This adaptation, with sweet corn and a whisper of shiso, is designed for an electric rice cooker. But if you enjoy it, I encourage you to pick up a donabe of your own.

Ingredients

1 cup (200 g) short-grain white rice
3/4 cup (180 ml) plus 2 tablespoons chicken stock, dashi, or water
One 1 inch (2.5 cm) piece fresh ginger, peeled and julienned
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 ear fresh corn, husked and kernels cut off the cob
One 3.75 oz (105 g) tin small sardines in olive oil (such as King Oscar Tiny Tots), undrained
4 fresh shiso leaves, cut into a chiffonade
3 green onions (green part only), thinly sliced

Method

Rinse the rice under cold running water until the water runs clear. Drain thoroughly and transfer to the rice cooker. Add the stock, ginger, soy sauce, and corn kernels. Give the rice cooker a gentle shake to mix everything.

Very carefully, with your hands or a pair of chopsticks, arrange the sardines in a circle around the perimeter of the rice cooker, tails pointing toward the center. Drizzle the oil from the sardine can into the rice cooker and cover. Cook according to your rice cooker instructions, on the setting you would typically use for white rice.

Once the rice is cooked, use the rice paddle to fluff the rice and break up the sardines, incorporating them throughout. Garnish with the shiso and green onions, and serve.

Reprinted from Tin to Table by Anna Hezel, with permission by Chronicle Books, 2023. Photographs © Chelsie Craig. Illustrations © Alex Citrin.

Top photo by dulsita/Adobe Stock.