Canned Tuna: Spilled Milk #25
Plus my favorite canned tuna recipe.
It’s spring, and the Copper River Salmon are running.
I am dreaming of renting a house in Portugal, on the ocean, for a few weeks this summer, but that won’t happen. I have to work and the schedule won’t allow for a trip like that. So I am drowning my sorrows in a tinned fish salad to remind me of my favorite days in Lisbon.
And for all those still dreaming of travel, my BEST ADVICE is to get a hold of my travel advisor friends at Escape Artists, and let my pal Trissa help you make your dreams comes true. (Not an ad, just love them.)
Anyway, I am a big fan of conservas.
That’s preserved food, such as pickles, jam or canned foods that are ‘put up’ in jars or tins so the product lasts longer.
And yes, one of my favorite conserves are tinned or jarred fish. It’s always there in my pantry. They can be insanely delicious if you purchase the right types and brands. They are often, ounce for ounce, less expensive than other comparable proteins. As meat and poultry prices continue to climb, home cooks can find tins of beautiful salmon, tuna (and mackerel, sardines, clams, mussels, squid etc!!) in their local markets and online, saving real dollars by incorporating them into their regular meal planning.
(By the way, the Portuguese invented the modern fish canning industry.)
Most people would be shocked to know that commercial tinned tuna and salmon in America is often twice cooked, resulting in dry and unpalatable fish. Think of the two most popular brands of tinned supermarket tuna— you know what I’m talking about. I’m telling you: it gets so much better than that!
Traveling around the world, visiting canneries from Alaska to Portugal to Indonesia, I watched first hand how beautiful fresh raw fish was delicately fileted and packed, a mix of belly and loin, laid in to jars and tins, covered in olive oil, sealed and brought to temperature and pressure to keep it shelf stable. The resulting product is beyond delicious, melting and tender when utilized.
The commercial product on the other hand is cooked, cooled, stored, then put into containers and brought to temperature and pressure sometimes with water, or oil. Sometimes with nothing at all. Imagine taking a beautiful piece of red meat, cooking it to well done, cooling it, shredding it and then putting it in a pressure cooker for an hour at 300 degrees! Ugh. That’s why it needs so much mayo to make a nice tuna salad sandwich out of a commercial product.
I love tuna or salmon conserva in cooked foods and freshly cut or crumbled on salads.
I puree either with capers, lemon, anchovies, mayonnaise and other ingredients to make fish based “sauces”, like an Italian tonnato sauce (recipe below) for cold poached meats or a looser version to dress salads. Trust me, go make a traditional Provencale Salade Nicoise with salmon instead of tuna, and dress the egg, tinned fish, potatoes, green beans, tomatoes, olives etc with a tonnato sauce recipe, but use salmon conserve instead of tuna and you will have your mind blown. I use premium tuna conserve in my tuna noodle casserole and will use any tinned fish in a lunch sandwich or a morning bagel-wich.
What’s more, the once cooked, premium conservas aren’t fishy.
At all. Why you ask? Good question! Twice-cooking fatty fish pulls all the fish oils out of the flesh, it makes it more offensively aromatic, dry and unpalatable in most applications, but that oil remains in the can, making it even fishier smelling and tasting if you don’t remove it.
It’s same rule of thumb when cooking salmon for example at home. Saute until just past medium rare and BEFORE the white dots of liquid proteins emerge from the fish, revealing themselves on the surface of the filets. Let fish rest for 5 minutes and serve. The fish will be cooked perfectly to medium with a faint blush, but the aromas in your home and kitchen will be NOTHING compared to what they would be if you cooked the fish to medium and allowed the proteins (and their oils) to come out of the fish.
My Go-To Brands of Tinned Fish
My favorite brands of tuna or salmon conservas are Wild Planet, Salmon Sisters and Patagonia Provisions for salmon.
For tuna, I like Rio Mare, Ortiz, Don Bocarte, Schwartz & Weiss, Wild Planet, American Tuna and many other smaller and hard to find Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and American brands.
Tuna cooked once and tinned in olive oil is heavenly. Try them, and visit the world without leaving your own kitchen, or smother your travel sorrows in tinned fish, or both.
It’s going to be OK. I’m counting on it myself this summer.
PS If you’re as nuts about tinned fish as me, there is an entire Substack called Popping Tins devoted to it! You can’t make this up!
My Tonnato Sauce Recipe
I like to use this sauce on cold meats (atop beef carpaccio is a favorite), or as a salad dressing (like a Nicoise salad), or even as a dip for grilled vegetables. Really, it goes with just about anything. Try it and you’ll see what I mean.
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