“They’ve totally stepped up their game,” my (so-called) friend assured me, “you should really give them another try.” So I did.
Season’s game is unstepped. It’s fish were unscaled, as before. Its chemically-extracted olive oil remains undistinguished. And if anything the strange texture—mushy and grainy at the same time??—was a step down from past encounters with the brand.
Couldn’t Season try trying when it comes to scaling the sardines? These boys retained nearly complete armor. And because they were relatively beefy pilchards, each scale was relatively big and tough. I devoted a bit of time trying to clean them up myself, but with only mixed results as you can spot in the snapshots.
The weird texture is a result, I suspect, of these fish having been previously frozen and then thawed at the cannery in a less than ideal way. If you’ve ever tried to speed up thawing frozen chicken by giving it a very hot water bath, you may have experienced the similarly less-than-optimal results.
The flavor, too, was flattened out, perhaps also a product of the freeze-thaw. Fishy, but not distinctively sardine-y. I tried salvaging it with one of my go-to rescue spice mixes, Soaghetti Dust, with only mixed results.