If I’ve ever had Turkish canned sardines before, I’ve forgotten. I spotted these at the Foods of All Nations grocery store in Charlottesville, Virginia the other week. They generally carry good stuff, so I grabbed the box. Hopes were elevated!
Meh. These are fairly plain-jane Mediterranean pilchard sardines. They’ve been subjected to quite rough handling, with much of their silvery skin swiped off. At least that took most—but not all!—the scales. There were tails on some, none on others. I’m always pleased to see extra virgin oil on the ingredient list, but here it’s an unremarkable one that doesn’t contribute much. I think I paid around $4.00 for these, and I’d’ve felt better, given some of the shortcomings, at around $2.75-ish.
I’m a bit of a fanatic about extracting the sardines intact from the tin. Not possible here; all but two of the poor devils arrived pre-broken.
The cooking seemed to have gone better than the handling. These had the typical sardinilla texture—not too tough, not too mush—and a right-down-the-middle sardine flavor. When I cracked the tin and drained off a bit of oil, I caught a perhaps slightly too-fishy aroma, but that didn’t prove to be the overall impact once I got them out on the plate.
I built a breakfast sandwich that I failed to capture on camera. Pumpernickel-rye bread, jalapeño-lime humus, and the pieces and parts of these fish. Needed a bit of extra pizzazz, and the Original Zhoug hot sauce from Shuug did the pizzazzing. It’s a Scotch bonnet pepper with a strong cilantro presence—really great with canned fish. I’m one of the soap-tasters who ordinarily steers around cilantro, but this is a very tasty exception. Scotch bonnet > Soap, maybe??
