EAT SARDINES, SAVE THE PLANET!

Some of the top chefs in the world are going to be serving up sardines, anchovies and other small fish on World Oceans Day, June 8. The list of chefs who have signed the pledge includes Joan Roca whose restaurant, El Celler de Can Roca, Girona, Spain, this week was cited as the BEST restaurant in the world. Amongst the chefs participating in Sardine Day—I mean World Oceans Day—are Massimo Bottura of Osteria Francescana, Modena, Italy, number two, and René Redzepi of Noma in Copenhagen, Denmark, in the number three spot.

Sardines at a 3-star restaurant? According to the folks at Oceana, http://oceana.org,  an advocacy organization dedicated to protecting the world’s oceans, the Chefs will help inspire and empower consumers to get involved in supporting Oceana’s campaigns to help restore the world’s oceans to levels of biodiversity and abundance that can survive and support the planet. This commitment is the result of a gathering of the world’s leading chefs in support of ocean conservation that took place earlier this year at the Basque Culinary Center in San Sebastian.

The small fish the Chefs pledged to serve – species like anchovies, sardines, mackerel and herrings - are known as “forage” fish because they play a crucial role in some of the most productive marine ecosystems in the world.

However, much forage fish is captured to make fish meal to feed farmed salmon, chickens, pigs. According to Oceana, we can feed tens of millions more people if we simply eat sardines and other forage fish directly rather than in form of farmed salmon or other animals raised on fish meal and fish oil. Eating more forage fish—along with scientific management of the world’s fisheries—will enable us to ultimately feed more people from the oceans and to be less reliant on getting our animal protein from livestock.

I’m looking forward to hearing how Chef Joan Roca cooks sardines! Meanwhile, I can do my small bit! It’s a good cause and, besides, June is sardine season. Another plus--sardines are loaded with heart-healthy Omega-3 fatty acids.

My favorite way to eat fresh sardines is espetones, sardines skewed and roasted on a wood fire at the beach. Here is another tasty way with these delicious small fish. If fresh sardines are not available, use fillets of mackerel or herring.

Sardines baked with pine nuts, bread crumbs and parsley.

Baked Sardines
Moraga de Sardinas al Horno

To fillet, lift out the spine.

For this recipe, the sardines can be filleted or not, as you please. Unlike boquerones, fresh anchovies, the bones of sardines don’t easily pull away from the flesh. You have to lift the spine with knife tip or thumb, then “unzip” it by pulling between thumb and forefinger. If you decide not to fillet them, tell diners to eat them with their fingers, rather than knife and fork. Once cooked, it’s ever so easy to separate the bones.

To clean the sardines, spread a thick layer of newspapers on the work surface. Slide the scales off onto the paper. Remove heads and innards. Rinse the sardines in ice water and pat dry on paper towels.

2 pounds fresh sardines
1 cup small clams (optional), washed
1 bay leaf
½  teaspoon salt
3 cloves chopped garlic
¼ cup chopped parsley
¼ cup toasted pine nuts
½ cup fresh bread crumbs
3 tablespoons olive oil
¼ cup white wine

Preheat oven to 425º.

Ready for the oven. These sardines are filleted.

Wash the sardines and place them in a single layer in an oven pan or cazuela.

Place the clams, if using, around the sardines. Break the bay leaf into pieces and tuck them in among the sardines. Sprinkle with salt.
   
In a small bowl combine the garlic, parsley, pine nuts and bread crumbs. Spread this mixture over the sardines. Dribble the oil over them. Pour the wine into the bottom of the pan.

Bake until the sardines are done, about 14 minutes.

Baked sardines.

More sardine recipes here. See more about World Oceans Day here.

FINS IN TINS

Canned seafood makes for easy meals.

It may be September, but in southern Spain this is still full summer. I want quick and easy meals, minimal cooking. So I’m taking my own advice (see a previous blog posting, Too Hot to Cook), and using canned seafood as the starting point for easy meals. With such a great variety, I’ve got lots of options.

There’s way more than canned tuna. Here’s what I’ve got in my pantry: bonito (white tuna or albacore), melva (frigate mackerel), caballa (mackerel), sardines and sardinillas (small sardines), anchovies, mussels, clams, cockles, scallops, octopus, squid.

Spain has long been a market leader in fish conserves.  Way back in Roman days, Spanish garum, a powerfully smelling, fermented fish paste flavored with herbs and packed in brine, was much appreciated in Rome.  Today tuna--albacore, skipjack and yellowfin-- represent more than 55 percent of Spain's canned fish production.  Sardines are second, followed by mussels, mackerel and anchovies.

Mackerel fillets in escabeche.

Tuna and bonito come packed in vegetable oil or olive oil; in escabeche, a vinegared marinade; with lemon; al natural, in brine without added oil, and in ensalada, which includes bits of pickles, carrots and onions.  Fish of similar family are melva, frigate mackerel (one brand markets it as melva de almadraba, captured in anchored nets), and caballa, mackerel.

Escabeche fish, with a piquant blend of oil, vinegar and pimentón (paprika) makes a ready-made dressing.  All that's needed is a good squeeze of lemon.

Canned fish in escabeche--readymade dressing.

Canned tuna, bonito, melva and mackeral can be used more or less interchangeably. All make fine salads and sandwich fillings. Best quality brands are those packed in extra virgin olive oil. But, if I’m making an ordinary tuna-salad-sandwich for the kids, I use cheaper brands, drain off the vegetable oil and stir in some olive oil. For something a little different in tuna sandwich, I like the capote served in tapa bars—tuna with mayonnaise and capers topped with strips of roasted red and green peppers on mini buns.

Canned sardines, whose bones are soft enough to chew, are an exceptionally rich source of calcium. The finest sardines are those packed in olive oil, but they also come in tomato sauce, in escabeche and picante, seasoned with chile.  Sardines make a great topping for pizza. I make a sardine “pâté” to spread on toasts. Combine drained sardines, chopped onion, Dijon mustard, lemon juice, dry Sherry, extra virgin olive oil, salt and pepper in a mini food processor. Serve on toasts garnished with sliced hard-boiled eggs and thinly sliced peeled cucumber.

I think of anchovies (in a tin, they’re called anchoas; they’re boquerones if they're fresh ones) as a sort of spice.  A dash of them adds pizazz to many different foods.  Chop some into boiled potatoes or mash with cream cheese to make a topping for baked potatoes.  Stir into butter with lemon and capers and pour over veal cutlets.

Squid in ink sauce, great for pasta.

Squid (calamares, pota or chipirones), cuttlefish (jibia, chopitos) and octopus (pulpo) all make fine additions to pasta sauces and, in a pinch, can be substituted for fresh squid in paella or seafood stews. Tinned ones are very tender. Today I’m using squid canned in ink sauce to make a topping for linguine. The meal is ready in less than 30 minutes! (See the recipe below.)

Linguine with squid in ink sauce, quick and easy.

Canned mussels (mejillones) in escabeche are so good that I pack them to take as gifts to friends in the US. (My mother was crazy for them.) They can be enjoyed straight from the can or turned into more complex presentations.  They’re great in a salad of wilted greens with fried croutons, crispy garlic and chopped egg.

Clams (almejas), cockles (berberechos), razor-shells (navajas), wedge-shells (machas), sea-urchins (erizos) and crab (cangrejo) are other shellfish in cans to be found in Spanish shops.

Imported Spanish canned tuna, sardines and shellfish can be found in many big supermarkets in the US or from La Tienda, The Spanish Table, or De España.


Linguine With Squid Sauce

Serves 3 or 4.

4 (80-gram) cans squid in ink (en su tinta)
3 tablespoons olive oil
2 slices bacon, chopped
½  onion, chopped                                       
2   cloves garlic, chopped
1   red or green bell pepper, chopped
Pinch of fennel seeds
1/3 cup white wine
Red pepper flakes
½ pound linguine or spaghetti
Chopped parsley to garnish.

Heat the oil in a pan and sauté the bacon, onion, garlic and bell pepper for 5 minutes. Add the fennel seeds, wine and red pepper flakes and simmer the sauce for 5 minutes.  Add the contents of the cans, cutting up the pieces if necessary, and simmer another 3 minutes. Add a little water if sauce is too thick.

 Meanwhile, cook the linguine or spaghetti in ample boiling, salted water.  Drain the pasta. Serve it topped with a spoonful of the squid sauce and a sprinkling of chopped parsley.

SUMMER OF SARDINES

One of summer's pleasures in Spain is eating fresh sardines, roasted on a fire in the salt air at the seaside.  The sardines are speared on skewers stuck into the sand in front of the flames and grilled until crackly. The aroma is irresistible, tantalizing.  You pick them up in your fingers and eat the flesh off the bones.  Accompanied by icy, cold beer and chunks of fresh bread to absorb the drips, sardines make a memorable meal, to be followed by a plunge in the sea and a siesta on the warm sand.
   
Spanish humorist and commentator on life, Julio Camba, once wrote that with sardines, you should never eat fewer than a dozen, "but watch how you eat them, where you eat them and with whom you eat them."  Sardines, he added, are not to be consumed at home with the virtuous wife, but out with a shameless hussy not afraid to get her fingers greasy.  "People once united in eating sardines together, will never be able to mutually respect each other again, so, when you, dear reader, wish to organize a sardine fest, choose well your accomplices."

This is because the pungent salty-smoky smell of grilled sardines clings to ones fingers, chin, moustach and clothes long after the feast is finished.  During the summer sardinada, sardine festival, in La Coruña (northern Spain), doormen at nightclubs and discos are said to spray revelers with air freshener before letting them in.

Sardines, plentiful both in the south (Mediterranean) and the north (Atlantic and Bay of Biscay), are of the blue fish family, related to herring. They are a greenish-blue touched with gold, with a silvery belly. Sardines never get much bigger than 8 inches (20cm), though smaller ones are also appreciated. (La mujer y la sardina, cuanto mas chica, mas fina—Women and sardines, the smaller the better.)

SARDINAS ASADAS
Grilled Sardines

Sardines grilled on the beach in Málaga are called espetones, for the split-cane skewers; in Cádiz, they're sardinadas; in Granada, moraga; in Galicia, where the fire might be fueled with wild gorse, aspetu.  You can grill them on the terrace at home on an ordinary charcoal grill.  A hinged double grill is useful for grilling sardines. Instead of turning each sardine, you flip the whole grill over. The sardines can also be grilled on a plancha, a flat grill pan or griddle.

Sardines to be grilled must be absolutely fresh.  Leave them whole, ungutted and unscaled. Sprinkle them with salt about 30 minutes before cooking.  For added flavor, place branches or twigs of fresh herbs such as bay, thyme, rosemary or fennel on the coals. When coals are hot, brush the grill with oil and preheat it before placing sardines on it. Brush them with olive oil.  Cook on both sides.  Serve hot off the grill.

If cooking on a plancha, drizzle the sardines with olive oil and brush the plancha lightly with oil. Sprinkle coarse salt on the griddle and preheat it. Lay the sardines on the hot plancha. Turn them once to brown both sides. They’re done when browned—3 to 4 minutes per side.

To eat the sardines, flake off any loose scales, then, holding the sardine at both ends, eat the flesh off one side, turn and eat the other side, discarding the head, spine and viscera. Allow at least a dozen per person.  Instead of plates, use slabs of bread or, as in Galicia, corn bread or cachelos, potatoes boiled in their skins, on which to serve the sardines.

If you have leftovers, strip off skin and discard bones. Marinate the flesh in a good vinaigrette and serve as an hors d'oeuvre with sliced hard-cooked egg and thinly sliced onion.




Stuffed Sardines
Sardinas Rellenas

For this recipe, you have to fillet the sardines. Really fresh sardines are easier to fillet if you first soak them in salted ice water for 60 minutes. Working on several thicknesses of newspaper, slide off the scales from the tail to the head. Cut off the heads and remove the guts. Grasp the top of the spine between thumb and forefinger. With the thumb and forefinger of the other hand, loosen the flesh around the spine and draw it down, “unzipping” the fillets as you go. Use kitchen scissors to cut away the spine, leaving the two fillets attached on the dorsal side and at the tail.

Serves 4 to 6 as a starter.

16 to 18 fresh sardines (about 1 ½ pounds)
¾  cup fine fresh breadcrumbs
2 tablespoons chopped serrano ham (½ ounce)
1 tablespoon minced scallion
1 tablespoon chopped parsley
½ teaspoon minced fresh fennel leaves
1 tablespoon chopped currants or raisins
2 tablespoons lemon juice
½ teaspoon salt
freshly ground black pepper
2 eggs beaten with 1 tablespoon water
¾ cup flour
olive oil for frying (about ½ cup)

Remove heads and guts from sardines. Butterfly them and remove spines, leaving two fillets attached along the dorsal fin and at the tail . Rinse and pat them dry.

Combine the breadcrumbs, ham, scallion, parsley, fennel and currants in a bowl. Stir in the lemon juice, salt and pepper. Add 2 tablespoons of the beaten eggs to the breadcrumb mixture.

Spread ½ cup flour in a shallow pan. Place remaining beaten egg in a shallow bowl.

Working with one sardine at a time, spread it open on work surface. Use about 1 ½ teaspoons stuffing mixture. Press it firmly on one side of the sardine. Fold the other half over and press to seal. Place the sardines as stuffed in the pan of flour.

When all sardines have been stuffed, sprinkle them with remaining ¼ cup of flour. Roll them gently to coat them on all sides. Dip the sardines into beaten egg, taking care to coat the open side. Return to the pan of flour. Roll them gently to coat with flour.

Heat enough oil to cover the bottom of skillet to a depth of ¼ inch. Fry the sardines in batches, turning them to brown on all sides, 3 to 4 minutes. Remove to drain on paper towels. Serve hot.