Do you haveanchoviesin your pantry right now? A few skinny tins tucked away in the cupboard behind the canned tomatoes for your nextputtanesca? That’s great, but I want you to very calmly walk in there right now, pull those anchovies out, and put them in the refrigerator.
Over the course of writing my cookbook,锡表,我意识到有一些重大的错误floating around out there about these salty little fish. While many Italian and Spanish grocery stores keep the tins in the refrigerator case, big-box American grocery stores tend to store them at room temperature alongside the rest of the canned fish.
And while anchovies are often eaten whole as luxurious, meaty snacks in these European countries, they’re too often relegated to a sparingly used, often polarizing, pantry item in American home cooking—a brash source of salinity that you can melt into some hot oil and garlic to start a pasta sauce. Could these two things be related? Do Americans undervalue anchovies and use them sparinglybecausewe just don’t know how to care for them?
I reached out to Ortiz, a Spanish brand whose iconic red, yellow, and blue tins of anchovies I’ve seen both on shelves and in refrigerators in specialty food stores in New York. Iker Fernández, the company’s American brand representative, tells me that he recommends refrigerating all anchovies, no matter the brand.
“Although they normally come in tins or jars, they are not heat-treated,” Fernández explains. While most canned goods (including other fish, like tuna, sardines, and salmon) are cooked in some way during the canning process, anchovies don’t go through any sterilization or pasteurization process. They’re simply cured in salt, and then cleaned and packed in oil. While there are a few exceptions to this anchovy production process (like boquerones, which are cured in vinegar and should also be refrigerated, or Patagonia’s anchovies, which are tinned more like sardines), most of the salty, brown fillets that we think of as “anchovies” are essentially raw fish that have taken a long, leisurely bath in some salt.
That salt is enough to kill harmful bacteria, but it doesn’t completely eradicate microbes inside the tin, which can change the texture and taste of the fish over time. Because of this, some tins suggest storing in cooler temperatures but don’t strictly require refrigeration.
“Anchovies are cured in salt, and the salt content once they are cleaned and filleted is still very high,” Fernández says. “This salt acts as a preservative because it reduces the water activity and therefore it avoids or reduces the microbial growth and chemical reactions. This means that even if anchovies are not refrigerated, there are no issues with food safety.”