MARGUERITE: I think the best example of that is the cod liver.CHRISTINE: Mm. Yes.CAIRA: Which sounds-MARGUERITE: Christine’s face!CAIRA: … which sounds delicious.CHRISTINE: It actually sounds like a punishment, but I did read the guide, and it’s supposed to be like the foie gras of the sea, right?MARGUERITE: Yes. And I think we were all quite pleasantly surprised by how much we like it.CHRISTINE: I’m Christine Cyr Clisset.CAIRA: I’m Caira Blackwell, and you’re listening to The Wirecutter Show.CAIRA: Hi.CHRISTINE: Hello.CAIRA: Okay, Christine. Today, we’re talking about tinned fish.CHRISTINE: Oo la la. Tinned fish, tell me more.CAIRA: Well, I’m really bringing this up to you because I just want to set the stage for you to really hop in your soapbox, and talk about how you missed out on making millions in this area.CHRISTINE: Oh, Caira, you heard me. I feel seen. Yes. I feel that I should have jumped on the tinned fish bandwagon a few years ago. It’s become so popular. You’re seeing tinned fish at a lot of specialty shops at places like Whole Foods. It’s becoming much more of a delicacy that people in the United States are eating. And I come from a commercial fishing family. I grew up canning tuna at home.CAIRA: So cool.CHRISTINE: Yes, it’s the best tuna. And I feel like, what the heck? Why didn’t I come up with this idea back in the ’90s? I could have been selling tinned fish at-CAIRA: But to be fair, you probably had no idea that it would become this luxurious item.CHRISTINE: I did. I did study abroad. I spent a lot of time in Spain, so I did know that parts of the world really appreciate tinned fish, but it really hasn’t caught up in the United States until just the last few years, honestly.So I’m excited to talk with someone who knows a lot about tinned fish here at Wirecutter. Marguerite Preston is our editorial director who oversees all of our kitchen coverage, and she has written our guide to tinned fish, which is an excellent guide.CAIRA: That guide has 24 recommendations.CHRISTINE: Yeah, it has a lot of recs.CAIRA: I can’t believe. That means that the kitchen team had to have tasted a lot of fish just to end up with that many. So they have everything from anchovies and mackerel to things like canned tuna, salmon, canned mussels, CHRISTINE: They even just published a separate guide focused just on canned sardines. And because, apparently, we’re completely bonkers for tinned fish, I should also mention that Marguerite was in a really fun YouTube video where she tries out a bunch of tinned fish on camera. So you can see some of the cans we talk about in this episode on that video. It’s part of a new taste test video series Wirecutter just launched. After the break, we’re getting into the details of what the uninitiated should know about tinned fish, the best ways to serve it, and some of the most delicious cans that our kitchen team found. We’ll be right back. CAIRA: Welcome back. With us now is Marguerite Preston, who’s an editorial director overseeing our kitchen team. She’s had her hand in nearly all of our kitchen guides. And for our tinned fish guide, she tested over 100 cans of tinned fish to figure out which ones are actually delicious, exciting, or worth gifting.CHRISTINE: Welcome to the show, Marguerite.MARGUERITE: Thank you. Thank you for having me.CHRISTINE: I am going to just start this episode with a total diatribe of how mad I am that I did not create a tinned fish empire, because there seemed to be all of these amazing little companies that have cropped up over the last few years. Why has the popularity of these just exploded recently?MARGUERITE: I mean, first of all, I should say the popularity has exploded in America.CHRISTINE: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.MARGUERITE: Many other countries across the world, the popularity never went away. It’s been a big part of the culture to go to a bar in Spain or Portugal, and just get tinned fish with your drink, and that’s it. But in America, I can only theorize, I don’t have any clear answers, but I think it sort of started picking up steam in the pandemic. And I think you could theorize a way about the sort of sudden coveting of canned goods that happened early in the pandemic. But I do think there’s probably a little element of that where people suddenly were like, “Oh, it’s nice to have shelf-stable things.”There’s also, I think, the sort of social media aspect of it where a lot of these fancy tinned fish just look really beautiful. They come in really beautiful packages. You open them up even, and they’re like these beautiful little silver jewels in a container. TikTok honestly probably did a lot for kind of popularizing tinned fish at a time when we were at home and kind of looking for entertainment. And I think there are a number of companies in the United States really capitalized on that.CHRISTINE: Like Fishwife is one of the big ones, right?MARGUERITE: That’s the really big one. Yeah. But again, a lot of this stuff is actually from Spain and Portugal, on the packaging is beautiful, but it’s been around for decades.CHRISTINE: Right, right.CAIRA: My TikTok was just full of these beautiful women in these beautiful marble kitchens, and they had tinned fish and caviar and chips. And it looked so luxurious. I could totally see the hype.MARGUERITE: And it’s good for you too. Fish is good for you, good for your skin, your nails, your hair.CAIRA: Your brain.MARGUERITE: Your brain, yeah.CHRISTINE: High protein, all of that.CAIRA: Yeah. So to be clear, for this particular guide, you guys weren’t just testing your “boring” tinned fish, right? No tuna in water or anchovies just to slap on top of a pizza. These are the ones that are kind of more fancy, but there’s still so many to pick from. So how did you guys manage to narrow it down?MARGUERITE: Okay. So first of all, I object to anything being boring.CHRISTINE: Object!CAIRA: I think canned tuna is pretty boring.MARGUERITE: Okay. Your basic Bumblebee, whatever. Sure. Kind of boring. But there is really lovely plain sardines, really lovely plain tuna out there. We just didn’t test those because we were kind of like, “That’s its own world and that could be its own guide.”For this guide, I think for the sort of first covers that we did of tinned fish, I did want to kind of capture that moment where people were interested in the kind of fun, fancy stuff that you could have at a party or whatever. So I did really focus on that. But outside of that, I really wanted to kind of … There’s a gazillion things out there, and I had to narrow it down, but I wanted to sort of capture variety both in sort of the types of fish and also the country of origin. Then I spent a lot of time looking at … There are like retailers that sell just hundreds of different kinds of tin fish.CAIRA: Wow.MARGUERITE: So I spent a lot of time just kind of looking at those, getting a sense of what the big brands were from other countries, getting a sense of sort of like what the ranges of types of fish. The big ones are your sardines, your tuna, your mackerel, even salmon.CAIRA: But then you guys also tested things like mussels or-MARGUERITE: Trout is another one that’s like very common. Things like octopus and squid.CHRISTINE: Yum.CAIRA: You guys were also kind of testing for, I don’t know, the beautification of these cans too, right? Because you want to be able to maybe gift them or have something that’s just nice, and it doesn’t feel boring when you’re eating it at home.MARGUERITE: Yeah. I almost thought of and approached this guide as kind of like one of our gift guides. Most of our taste tests were actually comparing apples to apples, basically, and we’re doing these really close side-by-side comparisons. This one, I was just more looking for variety and delight, and something that you would want to bring as a host gift, or open up and serve as a pretty spread. So that meant kind of like looking at the packaging, paying attention to how it looks when you open it up, how easy it is to eat on its own. Not all of these are easy to eat on their own.CHRISTINE: So you have these different categories in the guide. I think you have three main categories of the tinned fish. I think there’s the sardines and mackerel, right? Then you have the tuna, the salmon, the trout, and then you have the ones you just mentioned, the sort of the mollusks, the oysters, the clams, the dreaded squid for me. Are there some that are more approachable for sort of the uninitiated? I guess for like beginner level, where would you point people to start?MARGUERITE: I would start with like the trout, the tuna, the salmon. Compared to like sardines and mackerel, they’re a little less oily. You’re also getting a filet in the tin. When you get a sardine, it’s like the whole fish minus the head. The bones are in there. The guts … Not all the guts, but-CHRISTINE: Just some of the guts. Just a little bit of the guts.CAIRA: Can you eat the bones? I never know.MARGUERITE: Yes, you can eat the bones. Some people pick them out, but you can totally eat … They get pretty soft in the canning process. They’re just a little bit crunchy. Trout, I think is maybe one of the best. It’s like a really nice, mild, light fish. We have some really great trout options. If you’re like fish wary, that’s where I would start.CHRISTINE: And then from there, if somebody knows that they are cool with something a little fishier, like they don’t mind those flavors, would you point them … Mackerel can be pretty fishy.MARGUERITE: Yep. Yeah.CHRISTINE: So these oilier fish, the sardines and the mackerel.MARGUERITE: Yeah. Which can be really lovely and fresh tasty. And then kind of like the mussels and the octopus and stuff like that can be more texturally challenging, I think to people. And visually challenging.CHRISTINE: Is it fair to say that if you have a hard time with the texture of mussels or oysters fresh, you might not like them canned?MARGUERITE: Yeah. It’s a different texture, but some might even describe it as worse.CHRISTINE: Like chewier?MARGUERITE: Clams can be a little chewy in the can, but it’s still, it is like this creature with … This one really does have all its organs inside of it. It’s a funny bite.CAIRA: So a lot of the tinned fish that we recommend in this guide are kind of expensive. Some can be over $30 for a can, which is a lot. You also recommend a few that are more like in the $6 range, which to me still sounds like a lot for canned fish. Can you explain why these options are so expensive?MARGUERITE: I think they’re more expensive for all the sort of usual reasons that food can be more expensive. There’s the quality of the ingredients. It’s high-quality fish. If you think about, you go to a fishmonger, you go to a nice grocery store, and you buy a fresh fish, they’re expensive. So there’s that. Also, a lot of these are being hand packed. It’s not just some factory kind of like pumping fish into a can. It’s these little like really old-school canaries, where there are people that are individually cutting the fish, and carefully placing them into the can so they look really beautiful. You can look this up. There’s like really cool videos on YouTube of like really old school Portuguese factories or whatever that are doing this. Where they’re even like wrapping it in paper by hand. So all of that manual labor adds to the cost too.And these are also smaller production. It’s like not like they’re producing hundreds of thousands of these. And I should say too, I definitely like thought about price and these recommendations, but I didn’t weight it so heavily again because they’re like a gifty. It’s a special occasion thing. It’s not like you’re buying this for your lunch every day.CHRISTINE: We’re going to talk a lot more about some of the recommendations which are really for eating straight out of the can or these kind of elevated options. In the guide, you also have some recommendations for tinned fish that didn’t quite make it to that level, but that were good for cooking. What’s the dividing line between tinned fish that’s good for integrating into a recipe versus something that is great for serving as an appetizer or just on its own?MARGUERITE: Partially it’s just the vibe. Plenty of the things that you could serve on your own would also be delicious in a recipe, like especially the simpler sardines or something in a pasta would be lovely. But I think what it came down to for us was, could I open up this tin, add a dinner party, and put it on the table, and people would eat it? Or would I have to add a bunch of stuff to it to make it kind of appealing for the average person to eat?So like some examples from the cooking category were like this smoked herring from a company in Alaska, Wild Fish Cannery, which was really delicious, had a very strong smoke flavor. It was very salty. It was just like strong, strong flavors. And the flavors were delicious, but on their own they were a little overpowering. It was just like a little too much. It would have been really incredible if you had made it into like a dip, like mixed it with some mayonnaise, sour cream, herbs, lemon, et cetera. Same with like there, you can buy tinned cod, and what we found was most of the tin cod that we bought was actually salt cod. And again, it was like a very salty.CAIRA: Sounds good.MARGUERITE: Some people I think liked some of them okay, but to me, it was just like not something you could really eat on its own. But again, would be delicious if you could cook it into a dish, like mix it with potatoes or something like that.CAIRA: I have seen these videos, again, that I mentioned, on TikTok of these people putting their tin fish, and they’re making these gorgeous spreads to go with it. Sometimes somebody would be like, “Oh, I’ll just put like a bump of caviar to top it off.” That’s not realistic for me. So do you have any “recipes” for people who do want to make a meal out of it? Maybe they don’t want to cook a whole pasta dish, but they might have like a thin cracker of some sort, maybe something to garnish it. Do you have anything like that?MARGUERITE: Yeah. So I think the main thing you want is just kind of like flavor and textural contrast. So the fish, because they’re canned, even if it’s like a mackerel with lemon or something like that, which we tried and recommend, the lemon flavor is going to be more of like floral, rindy lemon flavor than that kind of bright, acidic thing. Fish is always good with lemon. So like a nice little like squeeze of like fresh lemon or some kind of acid, a little hot sauce, that kind of thing is great.And then freshness. They taste delicious, but they’ve been sitting in a can. So chopped-up fine herbs to add a visual contrast, the green, and then also the kind of like fresh flavor. Also for some of these, some of these come in like a nice creamy sauce and really don’t need anything. But for other ones, you might want to add a little kind of creaminess to it. I really like just mayonnaise.CHRISTINE: The spread you’re describing to me sounds a little bit like you’re having friends over, and you have an appetizer. You would traditionally put out a cheeseboard with maybe some salami and olives and stuff. Is this something you would actually like tuck into that spread? Like would you put a canned fish in with your other items on the cheeseboard?MARGUERITE: Yeah. I mean, I think I would make my own little fish board.CHRISTINE: Just a separate board? Yeah.MARGUERITE: I don’t know if I’d have fish and cheese commingling together on the plate. But yeah, and it can be really nice. Again, the acidic tart thing, so like some nice pickled peppers or olives, a few different open tins of fish, plus that, plus some lemon wedges, plus crackers, like some nice crunch to offset the fish.CHRISTINE: And are you serving them directly in the cans, or are you decanting them into something else?MARGUERITE: It depends. I did look for ones that you could serve right out of the cans, and a lot of them look really beautiful, at least when you first open it. As soon as you dig in, it’s going to start to not look as beautiful, but some of them are really stunning when you open them up. There are some that I would not serve out of the can because it’s just a little too much visually. I think the best example of that is the cod liver.CHRISTINE: Mm. Yes.MARGUERITE: Christine’s face!CAIRA: Which sounds delicious.CHRISTINE: It actually sounds like a punishment, but I did read the guide and it’s supposed to be like the foie gras of the sea, right?MARGUERITE: Yes. And I think we were all quite pleasantly surprised by how much we like it. It is this very kind of like fatty liver. Texturally, it’s very soft. It looks God awful when you open the can. But the flavor, like I would describe the flavor as anchovies in butter. It’s this salty, very savory, fishy flavor. It’s a very clean flavor, highly recommend it. But if you put a little on toast, you do a little squeeze of lemon, you chop some herbs, the herbs kind of cover up whatever kind of funky looks there are.CAIRA: The nightmare going underneath there.MARGUERITE: But it’d be a really beautiful appetizer. Yeah.CHRISTINE: I am picturing the spread I’m going to make. But I’m curious, what kind of crackers do you serve with tinned fish? Because I would imagine you wouldn’t want to go too crunchy. I would probably want to go low brow and do a saltine, but is that okay? Is that okay, Marguerite?MARGUERITE: I say yes. And that’s what we had in our tasting. I think a saltine is great because it has a certain level of salt, but it’s pretty bland. But you could also do like a … I’m imagining kind of like a long, thin, delicate, flat bready type thing. But also, bread.CHRISTINE: Bread.MARGUERITE: Just some nice sliced bread. Some of these come with these really lovely sauces that you actually might want to mop up with the bread a little bit.CHRISTINE: I love that.CAIRA: Okay. So if you’re a beginner, and you’re not really sure if you’re really into the whole tinned fish thing, you should probably start out with something that’s mild, like a tuna or a salmon or a trout. And then if you think you know that you like this, then you can dive into the deep end, and go for something more experienced like a mackerel is more oily, might be fishier, might be a little bit more pungent, or a sardine. And then if you want to kind of make a little meal out of it, make a spread for a party or just for yourself when you’re dressing up girl dinner at night, you can add an acid, like lemon always goes great with fish, or a fat, or a cream like creme fresh, or mayonnaise even, which I don’t, I can’t. But if you want to, go ahead.MARGUERITE: If you like tuna salad, you will like mayonnaise with fish.CAIRA: Sure.CHRISTINE: I love it. And don’t forget the heat, the hot sound.CAIRA: And hot sauce.MARGUERITE: Yes, the hot sauce.CHRISTINE: Bring us the hot sauce.MARGUERITE: Always the hot sauce.CAIRA: Yes.CHRISTINE: That sounds great.CAIRA: After the break, we’re going to talk to Marguerite about a few of her personal favorite picks from the guide, and what to look for on a label when you’re browsing the canned seafood aisle, and a quick lightning round about some of her hottest tinned fish takes. Be right back.CHRISTINE: Welcome back. Marguerite, before the break, you told us how you test tin fish and we talked a little bit about how to serve these things, but now we want to talk about some of the recommendations, because you have 24 recommendations in this guide. So I am curious if you could just maybe pick the top four for you. What are your favorites from this guide?MARGUERITE: It’s so hard because I could start listing and then just eventually list all 24 of them. One of my all time favorites is this one, it’s from a company, ABC+, which is Portuguese, and they make this trout and curry sauce. The trout is really nice. It tastes really fresh. It’s just like a beautiful trout. But then the curry sauce is like this thick, creamy sauce, and the curry flavor is so vibrant and fresh. It’s a little bit spicy. All the spices taste really fresh and bright. It is so good. You could easily just eat the whole can. I would put it over rice for lunch. The challenge is that it’s one of the more expensive.CHRISTINE: Come on, give it to us. How much is it?CAIRA: How expensive is it?MARGUERITE: I would have to look up exactly how much it is.CHRISTINE: I think it’s like $18. I’m going to guess $18.MARGUERITE: It’s something in the $20 range, yeah.CHRISTINE: Yeah.CAIRA: Dang.MARGUERITE: So you want to be like, “This is a perfect lunch. I’ll just tote it to the office.” And like sure, but it’s like a little piece of fish.CAIRA: So what’s your experience with this fish? Why would you buy it for yourself?MARGUERITE: As a treat for myself to eat the whole thing for lunch.CAIRA: Okay.MARGUERITE: But yeah, like at a party, I think it’s also like it is a good sort of entry level one, because the trout is mild and fresh, and also because the curry flavor does so much. If you like curry, even if you’re not a big fish person, this would be really delicious. So it’s good for a party. It’s kind of a crowd pleaser. Another favorite that is also a crowd pleaser is the smoked mackerel with chili flakes from Fishwife.CHRISTINE: Ooh.MARGUERITE: We tasted a lot of Fishwife’s fish and this was, I think, sort of far and away the consensus favorite, and really one of the sort of consensus favorites of the whole tasting. The smoke on the mackerel, it’s pretty heavily smoked. You open the can, and it’s this beautiful kind of like dark, burnished brown color. The smoke flavor is really nice. It’s balanced and woody. What we found with some of these fish is that the smoke flavor can taste a little kind of acrid or artificial on some of them, and this was not the case at all. But it’s very smoky, and then has a little bit of spice. They also kind of do it in this sauce that’s garlic, sugar, olive oil. So the sugar and the garlic kind of add a little extra … They’d really round out the flavor. So that’s another one that’s just like really, really delicious. Could eat it on its own, could eat it over rice, on a cracker. It’s great.Let’s see. Oh my gosh, this is so hard to do just four.CHRISTINE: You’re halfway there.MARGUERITE: I’m going to say it, the cod liver.CHRISTINE: Ah.CAIRA: Okay. That makes sense, though, because you have a refined palette, so this would be your top four.MARGUERITE: It’s different and it’s really special. The one that we liked is from this brand Minnow, which is, they’re one of these, the newer companies. It’s American. They’re actually based in Brooklyn. It’s like a restaurant group, actually, that makes them. But they’re sourcing their fish from elsewhere. So I think their cod liver is from … I’m actually looking at the box. It’s from Iceland. And it’s just the cod, but it’s really … Yeah, anchovies and butter, which is like a thing that I love. That’s what it tastes like to me.CHRISTINE: That sounds great.CAIRA: How expensive is the cod liver?MARGUERITE: It’s $10.CHRISTINE: That is not that bad.CAIRA: That’s not that bad.CHRISTINE: When we’re talking about all of these very fancy cans, maybe our view is skewed now since we know that they go up past 30, but $10 doesn’t seem so bad.MARGUERITE: Yeah. And it’s the kind of thing where a little goes a long way. Like that one, I probably could eat the whole can. I don’t know that I would eat … It’s a very rich thing. So you’d get a lot of mileage out of it.Let’s see. What is my number four? Oh, I got to say, and I’m really kind of like leaning on the American brands here, which we tasted so many, and there’s so many like cool and interesting things, but Wild Fish Cannery. They make a bunch of stuff now, but they make smoked salmon, and it is just so incredibly beautiful and good. They’re beautifully smoked. Again, you can open it up, and it’s like there’s just this beautiful kind of glossy brown color on top. The flavor and the texture is just really buttery and meaty. I think some of the tin smoked fish we tried was kind of dry, or some of the salmon was maybe a little mushier, or you kind of like had more water in it. This is just like, I don’t know, it’s like just like dense and buttery and meaty in a really amazing way. And the smoke flavor is really just real. It tastes like being in the woods or something.CHRISTINE: I would put all four of those on the table, and maybe I will. Maybe I will try those all together.CAIRA: Including the cod liver?CHRISTINE: I’m going to do it. Yeah.CAIRA: Okay. All right.CHRISTINE: It sounds delicious.CAIRA: Does sound good.CHRISTINE: If someone is, they’re looking at our guide, they’re like, “I don’t have any of these things available locally. I don’t want to buy anything online. I just want to go to my local store and buy something.” If you’re just walking down a grocery aisle, is there anything on the label that indicates quality? It sounds like you had to just sort of do a lot of trial and error to find the things that you thought were good. Can someone out in the wild be educated in terms of how they’re shopping? Are you looking for country of origin? Are there certain things on the label that they should be looking for?MARGUERITE: Yeah. And the country of origin thing is really tough. I don’t think it really tells you a ton. I mean, there’s so many countries with traditions of canning fish, and they can all do it well, that it doesn’t necessarily tell you much. And the ones I tested for this guide are from everywhere from China to Norway to Alaska.There are also sustainability certifications that you can look for. And if you care about that, that’s something you might want to look out for. There’s the MSC, which is the Marine Stewardship Council, and then there’s the ASC, which is the Aquaculture … It’s the equivalent for farmed fish. What we found in the sardine testing was that those really didn’t correlate at all to actual flavor quality.CHRISTINE: Right. It’s more about your sort of ethics around what you’re eating versus the quality of what’s in the can.MARGUERITE: Yeah., Yeah. I think the one thing actually is oil versus water. Is it packed in oil or is it packed in water?CAIRA: Yeah, that leads directly into my next question. I’m always looking at those labels when I’m just buying my regular canned tuna. I’m like, “Do I have to care about this? Does it make a difference?”MARGUERITE: If you were to ask me, or if you were to ask experts, oil is better.CAIRA: Because?MARGUERITE: Because it better preserves the shape and texture of the fish. And also I think better preserves the flavor and the mouth feel. That is generally better than not that. So for all of the reasons that toast is better with butter-CAIRA: You’re like, “It’s just an easy choice.”MARGUERITE: … fish is better with oil. It just makes it a little more unctuous, a little more tender.CHRISTINE: So back to my question around shopping for tinned fish. We’ve got links in our guide to all of the recommendations. Let’s say you don’t have a grocery store that has a lot of these tin fishes. You want to try them out. Are there online sources? What are some of those that you would recommend people go to if they want to kind of peruse, and also maybe capture ordering a number of things from the same retailer, so you’re not paying for shipping from a bunch of different places?MARGUERITE: Yes. One of the big ones is Rainbow Tomatoes Garden. They carry the widest selection of tinned fish of any retailer in the world. They just have a ton of stuff. They do a good job too of kind of describing what the fish are like and all that stuff. So that’s a good source. Another good source is Caputo’s, which is … It actually does have retail stores in Utah. It’s like a gourmet grocery, but they have a big online store. And they’re actually the importer for a lot of mostly European brands, so they carry a huge range, and they also do a very good job of describing, what is the deal with this company, and what does this taste like, and what could you pair it with? That kind of thing.Another one that I like that, it’s a smaller retailer and they have a smaller selection but could be a good option, if you want to try a subscription, which there are subscriptions out there where you can get a box of a few different tinned fish once a month, which is a good way to kind of explore and try new stuff. There are a few options out there. One that I’ve tried is Lata, which is a pretty small company. They again do mostly kind of Western European fish. I think the founders are Spanish. The thing I like about them is that even though the selection is small, part of the reason the selection is small is because it’s curated. I spoke to one of the founders for the guide, and he said that they taste everything themselves, and they kind of decide what they want to carry. And often, it’s just like a couple things from any given brand. So that’s good, but I think especially good if you want to kind of try the subscription.CHRISTINE: Marguerite, we want to get a lightning round in here. We’re going to ask you a series of questions about the type of tin fish you would serve, particularly the recommendation from our guide. And we want you to answer lickety split, real quick, don’t overthink it. So I will start. What’s the best beginner-friendly tin for someone who’s nervous about tinned fish?MARGUERITE: I think actually the Fishwife smoked mackerel, but also Minnow makes a smoked trout that is really lovely. I think it actually kind of tastes like bacon.CAIRA: Okay. If someone only buys one fancy tin this year, which one should it be?MARGUERITE: Ramon Pena is a Spanish brand. Everything we have tried from them is really incredible and delicious. It’s definitely fancier. It’s like old school. Anything from them.CHRISTINE: What’s the most underrated type of tinned fish?MARGUERITE: Cod liver.CAIRA: What about the most overrated?MARGUERITE: I like the fishier flavors. So I think tuna. There’s some really lovely tuna out there, but I want more oily fish.CHRISTINE: Would you eat tinned fish that’s past its expiration date?MARGUERITE: Yes.CHRISTINE: How long after the expiration date?MARGUERITE: It might depend on the can and the fish, but I will tell you this. Vintage sardines.CHRISTINE: Vintage tinned fish?CAIRA: No.CHRISTINE: You can buy sardines that have a vintage, that have the year that they were-CAIRA: Like a wine?MARGUERITE: Yes, exactly. And people collect them.CHRISTINE: But do they eat them?MARGUERITE: And they eat them.CHRISTINE: What?MARGUERITE: And there’s a school of thought that sardines … I think it’s especially sardines and tuna canned in oil get better with age.CAIRA: I’m so skeptical.MARGUERITE: The flavor develops. The texture develops. The bones kind of melt away. It’s a thing. And you can go online and you can buy a collection of vintages of different … Sardines from 2020, sardines from 2018.CAIRA: That is so niche.CHRISTINE: Are we okay if it’s sardines from 1996 or from 1940? How far back can you go?MARGUERITE: That’s a Good question. I have to do a little more research there into how far back.CAIRA: Just ash when you open it up. Just mush.CHRISTINE: Dust.CAIRA: All right. We’re down to our final question. What’s the last thing you bought that you’ve really loved?MARGUERITE: Okay. This is a very recent purchase, this was a big purchase, but I just bought a Cargo e-bike.CHRISTINE: Ah.MARGUERITE: So I should back up and say, I really rely on biking around Brooklyn. It’s how I get my kid everywhere. But I recently moved, and where I moved is both farther away from school and at the bottom of a very big hill. And my son is four and a half, and I am six months pregnant. So I don’t really want to bike him up the hill every day anymore. And then we found this secondhand RadRunner that’s in very good condition for $500.CAIRA: Ooh.CHRISTINE: Oh, nice.CAIRA: That’s a great price.MARGUERITE: It’s like a $1,500 bike.CAIRA: Yeah. Wow.MARGUERITE: Yeah.CHRISTINE: Well, Marguerite, it was so lovely to talk tinned fish with you and maybe we’ll get to taste some with you sometime soon.MARGUERITE: Yeah, I would love that.CAIRA: Thank you.CHRISTINE: Thanks.MARGUERITE: Thanks for having me.CHRISTINE: All right. Tinned fish. Caira, what are you thinking? Are you sold?CAIRA: I’m really sold on this fish. I like tint fish, but I’m not really going to go out and buy it specifically. If I pass it in the store, and it looks good, maybe. I do have to say that Fishwife, the mackerel, does look good, looks affordable for my price range. And most importantly, for me, it looks accessible, because I’ve definitely seen it at my local grocery store.CHRISTINE: Yeah. I think it’s becoming more and more available. I am feeling pretty pumped and inspired to do some kind of appetizer fish board at my next gathering. And so I’m going to think about all the flavors, and I’ll probably focus on some of the more approachable options that Marguerite talked about, and steer clear of the oilier like mackerel and sardines to start with, just as a nice entry point. But I’m excited to try.If listeners have any questions about any of the recommendations we talked about today, we have all of those recommendations in our show notes, we’ll have a link to our tinned fish guide. That’s it for us this week. Thanks so much for listening.CAIRA: Bye.CHRISTINE: Bye.The Wirecutter Show is executive produced by Rosie Guerin and produced by Abigail Keel, engineering support from Maddy Masiello and Nick Pittman. Today’s episode was mixed by Katherine Anderson. Original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Rowan Niemisto, Katherine Anderson, and Diane Wong. Cliff Levy is Wirecutter’s deputy publisher and general manager. Ben Frumin is Wirecutter’s editor-in-chief. I’m Christine Cyr Clisset.CAIRA: I’m Caira Blackwell.CHRISTINE: Thanks for listening.MARGUERITE: Yeah. Mayonnaise on a cracker.CHRISTINE: It’s our dividing line.CAIRA: Yeah. We’ve had so many debates about mayonnaise. I’m like, “I don’t want to eat it where I can taste it.”MARGUERITE: Oh my gosh.
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