Why conservas or gourmet tinned seafood is having a moment, handpacked in olive oil, vinaigrette or escabeche in colourful, attractive packaging by brands like José Gourmet, Sea Sisters and Siesta Co.
‘Tin-fluencers’ have helped change the food’s image, moving customers away from low quality, mass-produced brands to more sustainable artisanal-style producers
Writer and editor Anna Hezel grew up in Buffalo, New York, in the 1990s, eating industrially produced tinned seafood from grocery stores, like tuna, chopped clams and salmon that she describes as “a cheap convenience item”.
Hezel, author of the book Tin to Table: Fancy, Snacky Recipes for Tin-thusiasts and A-fish-ionados, explains how in the US, the canned seafood industry was on a large scale and fish were not sustainably caught. She says the poor quality meant that many people only turned to tinned seafood as a last resort.
But in 2017 she went to Portugal for the first time and saw how conservas, or tinned seafood, was appreciated as gourmet food.
“That’s when I really started to eat sardines and mackerel, and got excited about shopping for these things, bringing some home as souvenirs. It just really opened my eyes to the fact that there are so many different tinned seafood products to try, and each has something a bit different to offer.”
These days, people are eating more canned seafood as they travel to countries like Portugal, Spain, Italy and France that have a culture of preserving fresh-caught seafood. They’re also paying more attention to the origin of their food, something that became even more important during the Covid-19 pandemic.
It was during this period that Hezel hunkered down in New York and ate a lot of tinned seafood as she could buy it online and it wouldn’t spoil easily. She experimented with new ways of eating tinned seafood, which were then included in the 50 recipes in Tin to Table.
She marvels at how seafood is handpacked in Europe, saying, “They’re really nicely organised in the tin in alternating directions, and with a larger fish, it’s a carefully cut, full solid fillet, or a few fillets that perfectly fit into the can, rather than some of the machine-packed tins that look like they’ve just been shot through a chute into the can.”
