Sardines and mackerel: inexpensive, sustainable and dynamite

By Michael Cimarusti — May 10 — LATimes.com

Lightly salted and pickled sardines on toasted baguette with artichoke puree, tomato and black olive. (Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times)

Good things come in small packages. Sardines and mackerel are proof of this adage. These are fish for the converted, fish for people who truly enjoy the flavor of fish.

My first experience with fish of this sort came on a fishing trip in Maine when I was about 12. We were fishing freshwater, but we had brought along canned mackerel for quick lunches. I decided I’d try one. I turned the key on that little can and it opened up a whole world of briny, fatty deliciousness. I still love canned mackerel and canned sardines. Don’t get me started: Ever try a sardine bánh mi? No? Well, trust me, you’ve been missing out.

Sardines and mackerel are plentiful fish, whether you’re buying them canned or fresh. They are easy to come by and inexpensive. In a world where buying wild fish can be a minefield from a sustainability standpoint, these fish offer a haven, and a delicious haven it is.

When buying sardines, look for shiny, firm fish. They should still be flexed in rigor when you buy them, and make sure their bellies are intact.

Once you’ve found the sardines, you’ll need to decide what to do with them.

One of my very favorite dishes — one I could eat every day — is the pasta con le sarde we’ve served for years at Providence. It’s a play on a traditional Sicilian recipe. The pasta includes fresh sardines, olive oil, fennel, pine nuts, raisins and bread crumbs. It’s crave-worthy. Grilled sardines are also delicious with nothing more than sea salt and lemon.

Fish this flavorful does the heavy lifting; you really don’t need to do much in order to make them memorable.

If you want something that’s a little more involved and definitely dinner party material, try quickly pickling the sardines. Serve these on grilled slices of baguette you’ve smeared with artichoke purée and then top them with roasted tomatoes. It’s a terrific appetizer, or you could serve it with a big salad of arugula dressed with simple vinaigrette for more of a main course salad.

Really, any preparation that includes salt and a touch of acid will do: The salt to bring out the flavor in the fish and the acid to tame the fat. It’s hard to go wrong with sardines.

Mackerel is just as flavorful and easier to prepare, since it usually comes already scaled and filleted. I particularly like Spanish, or sierra, mackerel, which has a shiny spotted skin that does beautiful things when crisped in a pan or on a grill. This fish is also particularly abundant and inexpensive, and is recommended as a best choice based on sustainability by the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

One way I love to serve it during the summer is alongside a piperade, a slightly spicy mix of peppers, tomatoes and chorizo. This mixture works with all sorts of fish: mackerel, sardines, swordfish or bluefish.

Sardines and mackerel, like black licorice, aren’t for everybody. I get that, but you really need to give them a try. My son, one of the pickiest eaters on the planet, hounds me, nearly every Sunday, to take him to Park’s Barbeque for their broiled mackerel. Go figure. If he can relish them, so can you.

View the original article here.

Food Blog: Lemon Grilled Sardines

Total preparation time: 20 minutes. Total cooking time: 7/8 minutes. Total approximate cost: £1.02.

Autumn is definitely upon us now, but for a flavour of summer that is really cheap and not to mention great for you, give these sardines a go!

Ingredients:

• 1/2 Lemon
• 3 Sardines
• 2 Cloves of garlic
• Olive Oil
• Salt and Pepper

1. Clean and gut your sardines. You may be able to find them already prepared, or you can ask a fishmonger to do it for you. However if braving it yourself rub the fish all over to remove any scales, and then just cut the belly from the gills to about 2 cm away from the beginning of the tail and remove the innards. Rinse out and it’s done. See it wasn’t so bad!
2. Slice the lemon into thin wedges and scatter about half onto a baking tray. With the other half place in the carcass of the fish to allow the citrus flavour to permeate through.
3. Similarly slice the garlic and do the same.
4. Place the sardines on top of the lemon wedges, before seasoning and drizzling with olive oil.
5. Now grill in a preheated oven at about 250C for about 3-4 minutes each side and serve.
6. Enjoy! Best served with a green salad and some fresh crusty bread.

Read the original recipe and see a photo here.

Small fish bring big menu opportunities

Despite their reputation as oily, smelly, fatty and usually packed in a tin, there’s lot to like about anchovies, sardines and smelt. They’re extremely flavorful, loaded with healthy omega-3s and abundant in our oceans. And while small fish are found most often on menus in Caesar salads, atop pizzas or inside sushi rolls, lately more chefs are using them in appetizers or entrees.

According to Datassential MenuTrends, 21 percent of all restaurant menus feature at least one variety of small fish, an increase of 2 percent since 2009. They can be found most often at fine-dining restaurants, where 36 percent of menus feature a small fish. Anchovies, appearing on 19 percent of menus, are the most common small fish offered by restaurants.

Their rarity on menus, along with and their distinct flavor, is precisely why chef Joe Realmuto loves to put anchovies, sardines and smelts on the menu at Nick & Toni’s East Hampton and Nick & Toni’s Café in New York City.

Read the full article here.

Anchovies are moving out of the can and into the mainstream as chefs and grocers embrace them

SEAFOOD.COM NEWS [Canadian Press] – August 16, 2013 – Maligned and misunderstood, anchovies have long been those stinky little fish that sneak into Caesar salad or top some adventurous person’s pizza.

“My father would eat them out of a can,” says New Orleans restaurateur and TV chef John Besh. “If Dad was going hunting, he’d grab a can of smoked oysters or anchovies and crackers and that would be his lunch.”

But today, chefs like Besh have moved anchovies to the top of the food chain, showcasing them as elegant bar snacks, sophisticated bruschetta or the foundation for pasta dishes and stews.

“They make friends and enemies quickly,” says Seamus Mullen, chef-owner of Tertulia in New York City. “A bad anchovy is not a good thing. It’s a question of making sure you get the right ones.”

Getting the “right” anchovies has become much easier in recent years. The mushy, salty tinned anchovies eaten by Besh’s father are still out there. But more and more, the shelves of gourmet stores and upscale supermarkets offer high-quality anchovies preserved in olive oil, pickled in vinegar or sometimes even fresh.

More menus feature items such as “boquerones,” white anchovies, often dressed with vinegar. Fresh anchovies might be cooked over a wood fire or dressed with breadcrumbs and garlic. Sometimes, anchovies go undercover.

Besh uses them as what he calls “nature’s MSG,” melting them into beef daube and lamb stew to intensify the savory flavours.

Nick Stefanelli, executive chef at Bibiana Osteria-Enoteca in Washington, D.C., uses them to make an ancient Roman fish sauce called garum.

“One of the most classic pasta dishes is spaghetti with fish sauce, garlic and chilies,” says Stefanelli, who includes the dish on his tasting menus. “The product itself really takes it where it needs to be… It’s so simple and beautiful.”

Anchovies have been a staple of Italian, Spanish and Provencal French cooking for centuries. French and Italian country stews use them to provide umami, a sense of meatiness and depth. They are made into marinades and tapenades, tossed into pasta and mixed with garlic, breadcrumbs and parsley to stuff vegetables, such as peppers and eggplant. In Spain, they are among the finest tapas.

Read the full article here.

‘Dancing Squid’ Phenomenon: How Soy Sauce Brings A Dead Creature Back To ‘Life’

Soy sauce may be able to revive a dull dish, but it hardly has the ability bring dead things back to life. Yet, that’s exactly what the condiment appears to do in a GIF recently posted on Reddit.

Borrowed from a 2010 Youtube video, the GIF shows a cuttlefish seemingly coming back to life when soy sauce is poured atop it. The cephalopod’s body lifts up and writhes in the bowl, prompting viewers to ask: Is it really dead?

Indeed, the cuttlefish in the video — part of a seafood dish named odori-don — is no longer living. The cuisine, sometimes prepared with squid and known as the “dancing squid rice bowl,” rose to prominence after Japanese sushi restaurant Ikkatei Tabiji began preparing the plate in this particular fashion, according to CBS News.

So how does the squid “come back to life?”

Read full story here.

http://youtu.be/iqphVlp2VJI

How to prepare squid: How to clean, prepare and cook squid.

These are a few tips from our friends in the UK on how to clean, prepare and cook squid, note that the squid is a little larger than California squid, but the process is similar.

Points to remember:

• Pull out the tentacles from the main body. Cut just below the eye and discard the innards. Discard the beak and then trim the long tentacles level with the rest.
• Pinch the two fins together, thread thumb underneath and pull them away from the body, along with the membrane and discard.
• Pull out the shell or ‘quill’ and then remove the innards using the back of a knife.
• Cut the squid open, and scrape any more innards out and discard. Cut into slices, or score the squid and cut into pieces.
• You can now cook the squid. Frying is a popular method – squid pieces just need to be cooked for 30-40 seconds on a very high heat. Serve immediately.

Read more tips and watch video here.

RECIPE: Kalamarakia Yemista-Stuffed Squid

If you read my post about the Top Fish competition, then you know that I recently made a stuffed squid dish that landed me in third place. I am pretty proud of that recipe, and I’d like to share it with you.

I have served this dish to many friends, and they all enjoyed it. What is difficult about cooking squid is that you either need to cook it quickly or over a very long period of time, making sure that it doesn’t get rubbery. The way I prepare it is to bake it quickly, and it doesn’t take ages to chew—win win.

The prep for this dish takes about 10 to 15 minutes depending on your knife skills; I usually like a chunky chop, but with the squids being so little, you are going to want to chop everything pretty small.

Full recipe and story here

Sardines stuffed with cream cheese & herbs

Stock up on your Omega-3 with sardines. Sardines are cheap and they are worth their weight in gold. If there are people that don’t really like sardines, you can stuff them with cream cheese and herbs. They taste differently and I am sure they will be a hit.

Website – Seafood Health Facts: Making Smart Choices

How to Eat Sardines Sustainably

Please note that the quote below by Geoff Shester incorrectly states that most of California Pacific Sardines go to tuna farms. In actuality, most CA sardines are exported for canning for human consumption. It should also be noted that the Lenfest Report identified CA’s forage fisheries to be one of the most precautionary, sustainable forage fisheries in the world. California limits harvesting to only allow 2% of the total forage pool, leaving 98% in the ocean for other marine life

Written by Miriam Goldstein

Sardines school off Baja California. Photo by Jon Bertsch.

I only eat anchovies with Caesar salad, and am rather fond of the tiny fish that add a bit of strong flavor to the romaine lettuce. I’m unusual for wanting to get even that close to the tiny, oily fish – sardines, anchovy, menhaden –  that used to be a staple of regular American food. That’s why Julia Whitty’s recent article in Mother Jones in which she encourages consumers to pause before they “ take a bite of that sardine sandwich” was so surprising. You won’t find sardines anywhere on the list of the top 10 consumed seafoods – or do you? Here’s why eating more sardines directly would actually be good for the ocean:

1) The United States Pacific sardine fishery is not overfished. This may be surprising to people who are familiar with the famous collapse of the Monterey (central California) sardine fishery, which was described by John Steinbeck in his book Cannery Row. Puzzlement over this collapse launched one of the most important long-term oceanographic investigations of all time, the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigation, which continues to provide critical scientific information to this day. Over 50 years of investigation has shown that this crash actually WASN’T caused by overfishing – at least not directly.

Sardine and anchovy populations are actually  tied directly to large-scale climatic conditions – if they’re favorable, there’s lots of fish. If they’re unfavorable, the fish crash. Overfishing may have exacerbate the crash and slowed recovery, but it probably didn’t cause it directly. Some researchers are predicting a similar sardine crash this year due to unfavorable climatic conditions similar to those seen before the late 1940s crash, and are encouraging managers to decrease sardine quotes in order to speed post-crash recovery. (Though this is controversial – see this response).

Historically, sardine & anchovy fisheries in other parts of the world, such as the South American anchoveta fishery (the biggest fishery in the world) are less well regulated. Overfishing in these ecosystems leads to no room for error – if there is the slightest change in the climate that causes the  fish to reproduce less fast, the fishery crashes. Buy U.S. Pacific sardines.

2)   Americans should eat more sardines directly, and fewer sardines indirectly. Only about a quarter of the enormous U.S. sardine haul is eaten directly  – the rest are sold as bait or as fishmeal. All of the three most popular U.S. seafoods – shrimp, salmon, and canned tuna – are farmed with fishmeal or caught with bait. This is why Jennifer Jacquet developed her “Eat Like A Pig” campaign. Grist covered this issue in response to Whitty’s article as well:

Geoff Shester, the California program director at Oceana, talked to Grist contributor Clare Leschin-Hoar for the article, “Small fish, big ocean: Saving Pacific forage fish.” We followed up with him to ask his take on sardine-eating. In the case of Pacific sardines, he said that “the lion’s share go to bluefin tuna farms (ranches) in Australia, then to commercial longline bait in international tuna fisheries.” Overall, he says, “consumers are demanding the wrong things. Instead of demanding farmed salmon, which uses at least three pounds of forage fish to get one pound of salmon, people should be demanding the forage fish themselves.”

Also, sardines are healthy! They appear on the New York Times list of the  11 Best Foods You Aren’t Eating. Also, food writer Michael Pollan’s Rule 32 (Don’t overlook the oily little fishes”) elaborates further:

Wild fish are among the healthiest things you can eat, yet many wild fish stocks are on the verge of collapse because of overfishing. Avoid big fish at the top of the marine food chain–tuna, swordfish, shark–because they’re endangered, and because they often contain high levels of mercury. Fortunately, a few of the most nutritious wild fish species, including mackerel, sardines, and anchovies, are well managed, and in some cases are even abundant. Those oily little fish are particularly good choices. According to a Dutch proverb: “A land with lots of herring can get along with few doctors.”

3)   Since sardine and other small forage fish like anchovies and menhadan congregate in single-species schools in the water column (see the awesome photo by Jon Bertsch at the top of this post!), there’s relatively little bycatch. Fishers are able to catch these fish, and only these fish, without accidentally killing a lot of other marine life. This is emphatically not the case with the longline tuna fisheries for which forage fish become bait. Fish farming operations have other significant environmental impacts, such as the infection of wild salmon stocks with farmed salmon parasites and damage to the ocean bottom communities. Eating sardines directly is far better for the ocean environment than filtering them through large predators caught accidentally with more large predators.

Read the full article on DeepSeaNews.