Tell me about sardines

Cafe Society
41

Ah, Louisiana Hot Sauce. Never, ever get that shit in your eyes.

Same goes for those damn chili peppers. Also, a word of advice: if you don’t like biting into unexpected hot peppers, watch yourself on those. They hire students in the summer to do the peppers, and they have a bad habit of goofing off - stuffing peppers inside the sardines for a nasty little surprise. They’re not all like that, but keep your eyes open. Warily open, don’t get that juice in your eyes, either.

ETA: The above posters are correct about them all being pre-cooked. You can eat them safely right out of the can. I’ve burned my hands many a time on freshly cooked cans. The name of the damn machines is escaping me at the moment, but it was hell working next to that room in the summertime.

42

Ummm… Anastaseon, edify me. One of your line of products is Fish Steaks (in various sauces). That’s what they’re called on the can.

This seems rather ominous to me… when a cannery doesn’t even identify the fish in the package, I fear for what it might be. They are pretty tasty, comarable to sardines… canned and packed the same way… BUT what am I actually eating?

43

Herring steaks. :slight_smile:

44

Thanks folks. Ignorance fought.

45

Question: Aside from removing the heads and fins, is any further cleaning done? Are there ranks of workers with X-Acto knives carefully splitting the fish open and removing the innards? Or are the guts cooked along with the rest of the fish?

46

Fresh sardines - come to South Africa in winter - Bring a net!

47

You can get a variety of tinned sardines and fish steaks and tinned seafood @ 2 for a Dollar at Dollar General Stores. That’s 50 cents each! Other Dollar storews probably have the same deal.

48

Fresh sardines are a staple of Portuguese cooking. They’re served in a simple tomato-based sauce with boiled potatoes, and are absolutely lovely.

49

The slightly larger ones are also popular in Japanese restaurants, simply sprinkled with salt and broiled. They’re a bit of a pain to eat, though, what with the tiny bones.

50

Long answer short: No, no additional cleaning is done.

Short answer long:

First there are the fishermen, catching the wee fish out on their boats. I don’t know much about that bit; I’ve never been on the boats. The boats come in and empty their loads of fish into a chute, which feeds onto a line with ranks of workers. There are ranks of workers with stainless steel scissors* who snip the heads and tails off of the fish (and remove odd things like squids, crabs, anything not a sardine) and lay them in a can (cans made in the Can Shop, just off of the warehouse I worked in) - and that’s it. The lidless cans are sent to the sauce room to get sauced, then lids are dropped on them with a bit of compound in the Sealing Room, where a machine presses them together, then they are put in - those big ovens I couldn’t remember the names of last night? they’re called retorts - they’re put in the retorts and cooked up. Then they are sent to the misnamed labelling room where the cans are put on a line, picked up by workers (or a giant robot machine does it, which eliminated many workers jobs - I ran one of these for a short time) in horse stalls five at a time, culled for defects and packed into boxes of 25s, 50s, or 100s (60s if they are Port Side, and we had to make our own boxes, to boot!) put on a line to be piled onto a pallet (by tallymen, or “pile-its”, that was me, too, sometimes), and stuck in the warehouse or loaded on a truck to be shipped anywhere in the world. Right to your grocery store shelves.

Kippered snacks go through a slightly different process that I know little about. I never ventured into the Snack Room unless I was passing through to get to the First Aid lady. They are prepared a certain way, but still go through the same sauce room, sealing room, retort cooking, through the labelling room, etc.

    • there are several lines here. The majority workers are the “scissor-packers”, armed with scissors and hands wrapped in gauze and medical tape (no joke), who do piece-work. The biggest earners often take Fridays off. There is a packing contest at the Labour Day, and the same lady wins it every year. Something like a $500 prize, though - she’s a nice lady, too, she deserves it every year. There is one (possibly two now) lines called the SAP - stands for something like Semi-Automated Packers, or similar. It is a machine that the worker controls, bringing down a heavy bit with blades on two sides that cuts the heads and tails off uniformly. For the morbidly curious, yes, indeed, some fingers have been lost over the years. But none have gone into the cans, so far as I know, and it’s a very sanitary clean-up.

Enjoy those sardines, now. :smiley:

Please do note that this information is all from the time I left, and that was several years ago. The company has undergone new “management” (biggest shareholder hands changed), and from my parents account, things have been turned topsy-turvy since I was there last.

51

These are what I came in to mention. They’re around 99 cents/can here and really, really good. So good it does seem like they should cost a bit more.

52

The market near the office sells them for $3.99 IIRC. (They also charge $13 for Tillamook medium cheddar I can get near my home for $7 on sale, or $9 regular price – which is still more than CostCo.)

53

Lucky you. I absolutely love sardines (and herring and smelt) but my doctor specifically told me to avoid all 3 as they contain a compound called Purines which contributes to my gout flares. Beer too. If there is a God apparently he hates me.

I’ve found tins of sardines at Big Lots for 49 cents. I like the ones packed in Louisiana Hot Sauce or hot mustard. The plain ones are, well…very plain tasting.
Either way, though, they’re very good with crackers and a beer.

54

I’ll ask my mom for it the next time we talk, devilsknew.

Here is the standard Goan/Marathi fish fry masala though.

Copious amounts of kashmir red chili, or I think it’s called cayenne (mirchi, basically)
Turmeric
Salt
a wee bit of oil or lemon juice (tastes best on oily fish like salmon, mackerel & sardine so don’t add a lot of oil or liquid, just enough to make it into a paste)

Apply all over fish. Let sit in fridge for a couple of hours.

Coat with rice flour.

Pan fry on a very very hot cast iron pan with a few teaspoons olive oil until completely cooked through. Cast iron, honestly, works the best. I have a devil of a time cooking this on those cheap non-sticks from Walmart. I finally broke down and bought one heavy one I use exclusively for fish.

I don’t really do things by proportions but if you need those they’re on the site I linked to above.

Green Fry:

Basically take a lot of coriander and grind it in the blender with some olive oil, lemon juice, mirchi, and heaping spoons of garlic and ginger paste (I am lazy and use the bottled kind from the Indian store). Or, if you like proportions, look up “spicy Indian coriander chutney” on google for a more indepth recipe.

Apply a bit of turmeric to fish first, then apply chutney mixture. Let it marinate.

Dip in rice flour and fry.

I find that I like green fry for flakier soft white fish like tilapia and pomphret while I like the hot chili fry for fish like mackerel, sardine, salmon and kingfish.

Incidentally, if any of you guys live in California, non-tinned sardines can be obtained at this chinese chain store called 99 Ranch. They’re previously frozen but in really really good condition. My parents were here last week and took a cooler-full of fish back to Boston (I am blushing admitting this because my parents are still so “My Big Fat Ethnic Relatives” even to this day) because they had never seen pacific fish of that quality on the East Coast in the 25 odd years they’ve been in N. America.

The airline security made them dump the ice, out though, even though they checked the cooler in. Odd, that. I thought the water rule was only for on-board luggage. Must have been their terrorist fish.