Issue No. 123: Why does that tin of tuna cost so much?
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. Why?
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Issue No. 110: Inverawe Smoked Fish
In college, my roommate and I had a VCR with one tape: Braveheart. We watched it daily. Sometimes twice. I memorized the scenery as much as the dialogue. Regardless of the film’s historical accuracy, Scotland looked beautiful and I dreamed of going. Twenty years later, last spring, I finally had a reason. I had just […]
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Issue No. 87: Buyer’s Guide to Anchovies
It’s a cliché to say that anchovies get a bad rap. Everyone knows they’re polarizing—and most people avoid the pole altogether. The thing is, it’s not anchovies’ fault. It’s ours. Just-caught anchovies are universally delicious. It’s mis-steps taken to cure, prepare, store and serve that cause such ruin.
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Issue No. 39: Controlled Rot – Vintage Seafood
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? […]
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Issue No. 37: Smoked Eel
Let’s start off by addressing the elephant in the room. Eels get a bad rap. We think of them as slippery, ugly, mean, slimy, snaky. They’ve held an odd fascination for us since Aristotle’s time; he wrote that they emerged from earthworms. (They don’t—European and American eels all leave their homes to migrate thousands of […]
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Issue No. 14: Selecting Ortiz Tuna
Decades ago, chefs used to select their preferred tuna batches in person at Ortiz’s cannery, Spain’s highly esteemed fifth generation tinned fish titan. Batch tasting is still a common practice among cheesemongers; in fact, it’s a specialty of some exporters like Neal’s Yard Dairy and Essex Street Cheese, but for some reason it fell out […]
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Issue No. 7: Portuguese Sardines
In the tinned fish world at Zingerman’s, Ortiz tuna is the belle of the ball. Each year we sell a boatload of it. Last year we sold more than 30,000 tins. 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 […]
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