Mediterranean sardines at Whole Foods

The WF at 3300 Ashland today had sardines caught off the coast of Greece. A freak kitchen accident has forced me to delay giving them the GWiv treatment tonight, but tomorrow I plan to massage them gently with olive oil, sprinkle some sea salt on them, then grill them quickly and humanely over an intense fire. A squirt of lemon and a bottle of Meursault and I think we have the foundation of a fine meal. I'll report back on flavor and how they stack up against the Monterey sardines we've seen in the stores of late. Maybe there's hope for pasta cu li sarde later in the week.

Choey wrote:The WF at 3300 Ashland today had sardines caught off the coast of Greece...

Dang, I was intending to go to Whole Foods (albeit the one on Superior, though maybe several or all of them share in the wealth?) specifically to buy fish today but lingering illness has been playing havoc with all my plans... Maybe tomorrow...

Maybe there's hope for pasta cu li sarde later in the week.

Did you load your digital camera with film?



Antonius

HI,

Is pasta cu li sarde anything like this recipe I made recently?

Thanks for the tips on the fresh sardines. My Dad has been on a sardine tangent recently eating only the canned. I may buy some just to see how he reacts to fresh.

I made the pasta with canned sardines recently following the epicurious.com recipe. Though I used saffron, I can see I was a bit too timid because there is hardly any color from it.



I made this dish because I had bought a canned version from Italy, which was pretty dismal just before Christmas. Since my Dad was consuming several cans of sardines a week, it seemed like the perfect Christmas gift:



The canned version was pretty dismal. There was one large and one small piece of sardine present, everything else was a green mossy color and texture. We picked out something dark and round from the mixture, which tasted of nothing that we later decided was a raisin.

The freshly made version with the canned sardines was substantially better and will be made again. I can only believe the same dish with fresh sardines will be sublime. I look forward to the pictures.

Regards,

Cathy,

That's a mighty handsome plate of spaghetti there! That's a nice recipe too; the inclusion of the ground fennel seeds is not traditional but rather an attempt (and a reasonable one) to compensate for the absence of the wild fennel, which has a little different and more intense flavour than the cultivated stuff.

This dish is associated with Palermo and thus there is a Palermitano style (with, of course, a bit of variation in details) but there are versions from elsewhere too. In Sicily the constants beyond the pasta and the sardines seem to me to be the saffron and the fennel, maybe also the pine nuts. Onion is very often included, though not always, as was the case in the recipe you linked to, I think .

I remember reading a very nice and simple recipe from Lombardy in one of Bugialli's books for the interesting and tasty fresh pasta from that region, bigoli, made with fresh sardines. I should go look that up.

Antonius

Choey wrote:massage them gently with olive oil, sprinkle some sea salt on them, then grill them quickly and humanely over an intense fire. A squirt of lemon and a bottle of Meursault and I think we have the foundation of a fine meal.

Choey,

Sounds perfect to me.

Best sardines I've had were a B-day lunch on the beach in Spain. Sometimes it's not such hell getting old.


Enjoy,
Gary

everything else was a green mossy color and texture.

that's most likely finocchio silvatico (wild fennel), which is the key ingredient of pasta con le sarde.

at the restaurant that i worked at in bologna, the sicilian chef would have wild fennel shipped up from sicily twice a week. it arrived in great bunches of plastic grocery bags, dropped off hastily by some old guy driving an ape. he also brought lots of cheese and crocante di sesamo (sesame brittle) that we used to make semifreddo.

the wild fennel has a very different flavor than the fennel we're used to. it grows in huge masses along the roadsides in sicily, especially the aolian islands. it's got a pretty strong flavor, and is usually boiled for a time before being chopped up and used in the dish. it does tend to clump together and that might explain your 'mossy' color and texture.

francesco, the chef i worked for, hailed from siracusa, and insisted that the proper pasta con le sarde contained both pine nuts and almonds, and that the nuts had to be raw, not toasted. we would also fry a couple acciughe (salt-preserved anchovies, as opposed to alici (the fresh ones)) in olive oil with garlic and chile flakes and then mash it up a bit before proceding with the rest of the recipe.

Well, the sardines were just fine. Not great, mind you, but satisfying and to my palate preferable to the Monterey sardines. I'm betting they would have been better if I'd had them out of the water a couple days fewer.

Cathy2, you've come about as far as I have and I've been working on pasta con sarde for years. I haven't been able to improve on the advice I gave here, despite continually dinking with the recipe. I'm guessing that you could tweak your dish by using the fresh Mediterranean sardines like the ones I found at WF, perhaps add more fennel fronds, and punch it up with a few anchovies as elakin pointed out. Also, I'd recommend bucatini instead of spaghetti, and toasted fresh bread crumbs (muddiche in Sicilian) to top it off. Until we find California grown finochietto selvatico locally, I can't think of any other ideas for improvement. BTW, you might try a variation by adding some fresh tomato sauce instead of the pinoli and raisins. I've had that in Sicily and it's not bad, though I prefer the way you've made it.

Antonius, good idea. I haven't quite figured out how the darn thing works, but I'm planning to use one of theseto put film in my wife's digital camera tonight. She'll be so surprised.

HI,

Believe it or not, I did use bucatini instead of spaghetti. Instead of freshly toasted bread crumbs, I toasted Japanese panko breadcrumbs in the oven. I used a large bulb of fennel with quite a bit of fronds, though you couldn't tell from the picture. The only diversion from the recipe was the absence of ground fennel seeds because I didn't have any available.

My sardines were skinned and boneless only because it was on hand. The first can was mashed into the sauce. The second can was introduced just as the sauce was finishing for warming through. Unfortunately the sardines broke apart when being mixed in because there was no structure (skin and bones) to keep them together. It will be a more visually interesting dish with bits of the sardine peaking through.

The canned sauce had a fennel odor, which was identifiable the moment the can was cracked open. I'm sure the fresher version will have more impact next time with the ground fennel.

Occasionally we make a canned tuna with tomato sauce for pasta, which never quite tastes like tuna is present.

Regards,

Cathy2 wrote:Occasionally we make a canned tuna with tomato sauce for pasta, which never quite tastes like tuna is present.

Are you using Italian tuna in olive oil to make this pasta dish, or are you using American soybean oil/water packed tuna? You need to use the Italian tuna to make it taste right. In fact, to make it taste like much of anything....

Giovanna

Are you using Italian tuna in olive oil to make this pasta dish, or are you using American soybean oil/water packed tuna? You need to use the Italian tuna to make it taste right. In fact, to make it taste like much of anything....

Water packed whatever they sell at Costco tuna. I will take your suggestion to buy some Italian tuna for the next occasion. Of course, then it may taste too much like tuna!

Regards,

Cathy2 wrote:

Are you using Italian tuna in olive oil to make this pasta dish, or are you using American soybean oil/water packed tuna? You need to use the Italian tuna to make it taste right. In fact, to make it taste like much of anything....

Water packed whatever they sell at Costco tuna. I will take your suggestion to buy some Italian tuna for the next occasion. Of course, then it may taste too much like tuna!

Cathy,

I think the water-packed tuna often tastes fishier and less specifically like tuna than the olive oil-packed tuna. The imported brands from Spain and Italy are expensive to varying degrees but very flavourful in a good way. Genova brand, which originally was imported from Italy, was bought up by one of the big (San Diego based) companies in the States. For a time after the buyout, I thought it really dropped in quality but in more recent times I tried it again and have gone back to buying it. I eat a lot of tuna and the Genova olive oil-packed tuna is not bad at all, a good bit cheaper than the brands imported from Italy and also easily obtained for me (Masi's bakery always has it on hand, so along with fresh bread, many mornings I'll get a can of tuna as well and, with a squeeze of lemon and some good oil, that's a fine breakfast, brunch or lunch).

Antonius

P.S. I always drain off the olive oil from the can and reoil the tuna as needed for preparation with a high quality oil. The oils used in canning are not typically so great. Of course, the oil whereof I speak is 'EVOO', as they say on t.v.

Hi,

I just saw this article on curing sardines. It is also includes a recipe for marinated sardines.

Regards,