“I know it looks gross, but it’s sooooo good — you gotta trust me on that,” says Sakura Considine, a fashion and beauty influencer in a popular Tiktok Video. Her French-manicured hands pull the silver aluminum lid off a small, oval jar Sardines in miso sauce against a white background while her voiceover explains that that can of sardines was something her grandmother served her over rice when she was little.
Considine goes on to list the many health benefits of the little silver fish — it’s high in protein, omega-3s, calcium, vitamin D and vitamin B12, and low in mercury — adding, “It’s really good for that, too.” Hair growth, as you know, is really important to me.”
Sardines were once the food of the working class, packaged in shelf-stable cans, ready to rip open and squirt the oily kind over a piece of bread, no utensils required. While that association hasn’t entirely left food, today a younger, wealthier, and more sophisticated generation has helped make sardines a trendy superfood. The health benefits aren’t the only attraction. Sardines, with their relatively mild, slightly fishy flavor and meaty texture, are less polarizing than, say, salty canned anchovies. And yet they are also more exciting than the sandwich tuna. As such, they have become a household name in a real revival of canned fish in recent years. And they’re still as affordable and practical as older generations might remember them.
Anna Hezel, author of the upcoming cookbook Tin to Table: Unusual snack recipes for tin enthusiasts and A-fish ionados (and former managing editor of TASTE), says that sardines are a “gateway fish” for many people who only discover canned seafood: “They’re pretty neutral and you can do a lot with them and they can be cheap but they can also be fancy.”
She recommends a sardine tip Rice dish by Naoko Takei Moore, which Hezel picked up in her cookbook to incorporate sweetcorn and shiso. It’s an elegant and easy recipe that pulls the flavor of the fish through the rice, “using a $3 can of sardines,” she says.
Others recommend bringing out the natural flavor of the sardines on the bread with nothing more than a dollop of good butter and a few grains of flaky salt. A few contrasting nibbles, like pickled peppers or radishes, can help round out the board.
Fried Sardines from Anna Hezel’s new book, tin at table
“Cans have become as diverse as wine,” says Kathy Sidell, owner of Somersault girl Restaurants in Boston, London and a recently opened location in Los Angeles that sells 30 types of canned sardines — and that’s just sardines amid a wall of other canned seafood. They’re packed with everything from tomato sauce to lobster oil to lemon confit and chili peppers. All of these canned varieties also read like a wine list, along with an extensive, ultra-luxe menu that includes towers of raw seafood, caviar, and a $249 Wagyu steak.
Saltie Girl is part of a wave of lively spots across the country to highlight conservas, as the canned rations are known in Spain and Portugal. The current revival of canned fish has also boosted online marketplaces such as Tin Can Fish and the Canned Fish Market, more Booksand a fervent one online fandom who often shares pictures of her cans and fish.
In fact, there might be something to do with the aesthetics of canned fish that are partially driving the sardine boom. The iconic rectangular cans, in which the fish are packed in alternating rows, with their heads decapitated and their tails escaping, inspire euphemisms (“packaged like sardines”), nostalgia for a pre-plastic era of food production, and painting in abundance.
At the same time, can designs are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Liked while vintage packaging Minerva‘s or King OscarThis has its own appeal, newer producers like it Jose Gourmet and Ar de Arte have curated a collection of illustrations by local artists for their boxes. These designs all help attract new audiences to an old-fashioned product, Sidell says. And for aficionados, stocking up on a full pantry is akin to collecting baseball cards — although you can serve them up with a stack of sourdough crackers.
For the more adventurous, hunting down rarer (and often more expensive) delicacies like smoked squid, cockles, and uni might be the pinnacle of canned seafood satisfaction. Sardines, on the other hand, are steadfast. They’re ubiquitous on grocery store shelves (at least one or two varieties) and yet the line seems endless—“lightly smoked” is just the start. There are also sardinillas, a smaller specimen with preserved delicate tails. The prices for cans range, but never as high as those for bottles of wine.
But these are the least of the virtues of sardines. The widespread availability of canned fish might alert you that sardines are one of the most abundant fish in the oceans. And as with other game species, small pelagic fish like anchovies and sardines offer some of the lowest Greenhouse gas emissions per nutrient density for human nutrition.
However, most of these smaller fish that are caught are for non-human consumption such as aquaculture and cattle feed. And here lies the biggest inefficiency in our contemporary seafood eating habits: these small fish are fed to larger, carnivorous species (such as Industry full of pollution and ecological damage) so that people can eat these animals. But you lose so much potential food and nutrition in this production chain when you feed smaller fish like sardines to a salmon to raise for human consumption. They also increase the toxins in that salmon or larger animal through a process known as Biomagnification. So why not just eat the sardines yourself?
“There would be this incredible four to six-fold increase in food from the ocean on planet Earth, and it wouldn’t have the degradation of natural, pristine ecosystems that are being converted to fish farms around the world,” says Bill Carvalho, founder of wild planet Fooda US-based brand of canned seafood.
Founded in 2001, the company started out selling tuna before adding sardines to its products in 2010. The grandson of Portuguese immigrants, Carvalho grew up eating all kinds of seafood and learned to preserve it at home, fetching raw tuna from the fishing piers in Eureka, California, and pressure cooking it in jars.
Wild Planet’s sardines are now selling better than tuna per unit in health food stores, says Carvalho. This could indicate that many people are now interested in sardines for sustainability or health reasons. But it’s also a product that really benefits from being intentionally reintroduced to customers, he says, adding that in-store demonstrations are the company’s most effective educational strategy.
“People say, ‘Oh, my grandfather always had these with crackers,’ or ‘Oh, that’s disgusting,'” Carvalho says of customers’ initial reactions to sardines.
The store rep giving the demonstration then gave them the health-focused pitch: vitamin potency, omega-3s, low mercury. Maybe hair growth. Then they would offer a taste.
“You would see that [the sardines] didn’t look too bad and they would take a taste and boom – get a lot of customers that way.
put it aside explores the world of food, from the fluorescently lit aisles to the nooks and crannies of your closet. We dive into why certain ingredients have pantry staple status, the link between cookbooks and buying habits, online grocery shopping verification, and what’s being put on hold in the process.
Photo: Chelsie Craig