Tinned tuna Buddha

Hong Kong Airport, Terminal 1, Departures Hall, Non-restricted area, 10,000 tins of tuna—not Ortiz.

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Do cheese and tuna have anything in common? What happened when I selected tinned tuna at Ortiz.

Decades ago chefs used to select their preferred tuna batches from the factory at Ortiz, Spain's highly esteemed fifth generation tinned fish titan. Cheesemongers do this with cheese, in fact it's a specialty of some exporters like Neal's Yard Dairy and Essex Street Cheese. But it's something that hasn't been done for decades with tinned fish. Last fall I visited with my colleague Brad to see if we could revive the practice.

We landed in Barcelona on a sunny November Sunday, a couple weeks after the six month tuna season had ended. It was a four hour drive northwest to Getaria, a small town on the Bay of Biscay, where the weather got progressively more Irish along the way: wetter, mistier, greener. Tasting was 9am Monday, a fifteen foot table in the break room set up with twenty-six batches of tuna and sardines. We had a round of Nespresso pod coffees and went to work.

The first question on all of our minds—including the folks from Ortiz, who, being in their 30s and 40s, had never batch tasted either—was "Can we taste a difference?" That got answered quickly. The second tin we tasted was very different than the first. That continued throughout the morning with some batches being good, some excellent, and a couple extraordinary. There is a big difference between batches of tinned fish.

The main differences in flavor were complexity, balance between sweetness and brine, and length. The best tunas had a range of high and low notes, were never just sweet or just salty, and had great length of flavor. Color foreshadows flavor: if a tuna was rosier, it was often better tasting. Texture played a smaller part on these tins, just made this summer, but over time it has a much bigger role. The older a tinned tuna in oil, the softer and more luxurious its mouthfeel.

The fishing boats in Getaria.

One thing that you may be asking is, "What constitutes a batch of tinned fish?" It's a little more complicated than with cheese, where a batch is a single day's make, usually a mix of last night's and that morning's milk. A tuna batch is a single catch from a single boat, brought in at one time and sold to one buyer. That's how fish are managed in the Biscay auction market and Ortiz stays faithful to the one boat one batch cooking, which means the tin you get from Ortiz is traceable back to a single boat on a single day's catch (that said, a catch may last longer than a day, but it comes from a single shoal of fish). It may take several days to cook a big catch and, since the fish in it are different sizes and different ages, there's bound to be more variability than with a single batch of cheese.

We decided on a single catch of bonito, caught that summer, but brought examples of nearly every tin we tasted back to Michigan so we can taste again and confirm what we thought. A second round of tasting is one of those steps that I've learned, over time, to be important when I'm making a big flavor decision. Sometimes, out on the road where everything may be a bit more exciting, I can talk myself into liking something that, second time around, doesn't live up to the hype. 

We're going to cellar a few thousand tins, too. I tasted some two and three year old tunas at Ortiz and pretty much everything I likede about a young tuna got better when they aged. (This is only true for good tuna stored in oil—water-packed tuna gets worse with age.) The good thing about aging tuna is its a lot easier than aging wine. You don't need a special cellar with specific humidity and temperature. Tuna in a tin is practically indestructible. Our aging room is going to consist of boxes stacked on a pallet stored high up on the racks in our warehouse, wrapped in plastic with a note that says "Don't Touch till 2016!"

Our first selected tunas will arrive this May.

Tasting at Ortiz

We spent today tasting 19 batches of tuna and—bonus!—6 batches of sardines. The first question, "Will we be able to taste a distinction?" was answered as soon as we tried the second batch. It was a quite a bit different. They all were. We were able to pretty much agree on what we liked most and selected a batch caught in mid summer for the bonito oval tins and another batch for belly cut ventresca and loins in a jar (something new for us). Then we went to a restaurant to eat some fish. More to come. 

What do cheese and tuna have in common?

When I visited Spain last fall I had lunch with the brothers who own Ortiz, the source for our amazing tuna. They represent the fifth generation of the family running the company and they both grew up in the business. We ate at a seafood restaurant (naturally) and I remember the hake cheeks (!) we're really good, cooked in olive oil, scattered on a wide platter. The restaurant edged up to a walled, brackish tidal inlet that snakes through the town of Ondarroa, along the Bay of Biscay. Fishing boats were parallel parked along it. Across the water we could see the back side of the plant we'd just visited. It's Ortiz's oldest fish factory (they now have seven) and it's still downtown, right in the village, squeezed on main street between cell phone shops and cafes and hanging laundry. The family still maintains an apartment on the top floor.

Lunch was a bit rushed because we had to get to La Mancha that evening. We were going to see the cheese making at Finca La Solana, the farm that Essex Street Cheese Co. gets its Manchego. We were also going to taste batches of cheese to select for export. Batch selection is a process that was pioneered in its modern form by Neal's Yard Dairy in England. The idea is that, since cheese is made every day, every day is like a different vintage of cheese. Every vintage tastes different so you want to pick the best days. There differences result from different weather conditions, different food for the animals, a different starter and so on. With farmhouse cheese that's made naturally, all the variations add up to enough of an impact on flavor so that anyone can taste the difference between batches. I'm not exaggerating; I could bring you two different days of Manchego and no matter how much experience you've had tasting cheese I guarantee you would be able to taste a big difference between them. Companies like Neal's Yard Diary and Essex taste many batches of cheese and select certain days (called "makes") for their customers. In doing so they catch the high peaks of flavor when they come once in a while and avoid the off-flavor wheels. The results are cheeses that are more consistently better tasting.

When I described the cheese selection we were going to do one of the brothers lifted an eyebrow. He spoke some Basque to his brother (totally incomprehensible) and then told me that what we were doing sounded a lot like what chefs used to do with their tuna. When he was a young man he remembered them visiting the Ortiz factory to taste with his father and select a particular batch of tinned tuna they liked most. All the following year, whenever the restaurant ordered, only tins from that batch of tuna were delivered.

I asked them, "Does anyone do this any longer?" "No." "Could we do it?" "Sure." 

I said, "See you next year!" as we bolted for the car. I've been excited about the trip ever since. Tomorrow I fly to Spain to taste this summer's and fall's tuna batches. More to come.

Why is one tinned tuna better than another?

Take two tins of tuna, one from Ortiz, one typical of the supermarket. One smells like the sweet sea, peels off in thick blond chunks and tastes like a fancy dinner out. The other smells like harbor at low tide, spoons out in pulpy shreds and tastes like saltwater. They came from the same animal living in the same ocean. What happened? Here are a five buyer's guide tips to understand what makes one tinned tuna different from another.

1. How are the tuna fished?
Bonito tuna, a common species for tinning, are not big fish. Most are two feet long and weigh about ten pounds. They’re warm-blooded. Taken together that means any bruising or bleeding affects a large portion of each fish and muddies its flavor. That’s rare with Ortiz’s tuna since they are entirely line caught, classic fisherman style, one at a time on a rod. It’s more common with netted fish—the most common way to catch tuna, where hundred foot long nets drag the tuna in a thrashing bundle up from the sea.

2. How are they stored at sea?
Tuna are stored in a boat’s hold on ice. A more conscientious captain will freight a lot of ice, enough to surround each fish so they don’t touch one another and cool down quickly. After all, no one knows how long they’ll be at sea or how much they'll catch and the fish starts to deteriorate the moment it’s caught.

3. What happens after they're cooked?
Cooking canned tuna is more or less standardized: the fish is boiled in salted water for a couple hours. But what happens next is not at all the same from factory to factory. At Ortiz the just-cooked fish sits out to cool in the kitchen, then gets time to chill in cold storage. The two steps take hours and hog up space on the floor and in the refrigerators. Not all tuna makers choose to take it.  Like most food makers who worry about price more than flavor, they cut time out of the equation. What the extra time and care does, though, is critical. It stops the fish from fermenting. Fermenting can be ruinous—a carbonation that makes the tins unsalable—or it can be mild. Even mild fermentation has a flavor that, to my taste, is a sour tang that runs throughout most tins of cheap tuna and mars its sea-sweet origins.

4. How are they cleaned?
Another act of grace Ortiz commits after cooking is to clean its tuna by hand. This is as labor-intensive as it sounds (if you’ve ever deboned and skinned cooked fish you know what I mean). It's not at all standard practice in the tuna world. The women—and I can say from my experience visiting that 100% of the cleaners are women—work meticulously with paring knives, scraping and cleaning every bruise, every discoloration, every chance for the flavor to head south, leaving only pristine fish to find their way into the tin.

5. What goes into the tin?
Whole chunks of fish and olive oil. That’s it. No flakes, no water. That’s the way you get great tinned tuna. Shredded smaller pieces deteriorate faster and that will show in the flavor. As for olive oil, well, the American tuna industry has pawned off water-packed tuna as healthier but what they failed to mention was that in losing 20% of the calories we lost 98% of the taste. Water leaches flavor from the fish. Ortiz only packs in olive oil, which amplifies the tuna’s flavor and gives it a silky, rich mouthfeel.

Ondarroa

Ortiz built their second fish factory in Ondarroa, Spain. They have five now. The first factory is no more but number two is still running strong, nearing its 100 year anniversary. It's the place where they tin much of the tuna we sell. It's five stories high, located on the little fishing town's main street. You park up the block and walk down to the factory at Calle de Iñaki Deuna, number 15, and the storefronts along the way go like this: cell phone shop, shoe store, café, fish factory, grammar school, bakery. These are pictures from across the canal. One of the buildings you're looking at is the factory, built shoulder to shoulder with apartment houses. If you're wondering what it's like waking up next to a fish factory I'll tell you that it's probably just fine—as long as it's this one. I spent the morning there, the smell is sweet and lovely, like the sea. In fact, the Ortiz family built themselves an apartment on the top floor of the factory. For much of the last century they lived there and raised a family above vaults of tuna.

Wall tiles from a fish restaurant in Ondarroa:

Potato Salad Nicoise

Basically, instead of tinned tuna I used tinned mackerel. It makes a lighter dish that's slightly less sweet. Then other changes appeared.

This Nicoise salad is courtesy my usual style of random crisper box cooking, what my daughter has affectionately dubbed "chickpeas and groceries." The Nicoise elements are potatoes, green beans, hard boiled egg, tinned fish. To that I slipped in sliced radishes, parsley, capers and a couple anchovies. Black pepper, salt and some olive oil, too. No olives, no lettuce. And I mix it all in a jumbled mess which makes it more like a potato salad Nicoise, not the picture-perfect composed salad you usually see.

Nicoise salads — like most salads — are trickier than they seem. Besides starting with good ingredients there are a few techniques that keep it away from bland-dom.

Potatoes: cook them whole, in their jackets, in very salty water. Cool them in the water, then undress them. Slip the peel off with your fingers or the edge of a paring knife. Chop into odd sized chunks.

Tinned fish: dump in the whole tin, olive oil and all. Don't skimp on the quality of the fish. This is one place you'll really taste the difference.

Green beans: barely blanch in very salty water, then chill quickly in a bowl of ice water. Dry them off.

Egg: cook it on the softer side of hard, then chop it to bits so it emulsifies a bit with the olive oil.

Olive oil: add a lot of a tasty one. This one is from Nice if that helps.

Mix: with your hands. This is my advice on mixing nearly every salad. Hand mixing lets you know when all the parts are coated. It gets the salad to be dressed more homogenously. When it's ready to eat it's not pretty (like the picture above), but it's very tasty:

Recipe: Whole Baked Fish

Baking a whole fish is supremely easy. It's easier than cooking a whole chicken. It's easier than cooking a whole cauliflower. It's easier than cooking almost anything. Making a salad is orders of magnitude more difficult. I wouldn't even call it "cooking," but for the fact there's an oven involved.

Whole baked fish is also super tasty. It's one of those rare triumphs in cooking where the reward in flavor seems utterly divorced from the effort required. It shouldn't be this easy to make something this good.

While we're often used to fillets and fish parts in America, going whole fish is very common in the Mediterranean and, I'm sure, many other places I've never visited. I've had whole fish in Italy and Spain and, most memorably, on Greek islands where tiny unnamed species not much bigger than bluegills are served on a warm plate, taking hours and liters of wine to pick through.

Whole Baked Fish Recipe

Have your fishmonger clean a whole fish, leaving the head on. Yes, leave it on. It makes a difference.

My favorite fish to bake whole these days is branzino. My fishmonger was out of it this week so I got bream instead, pictured above. To give you an idea on size, this one was a little over a pound before cleaning. It makes a light meal for two.

Heat the oven to 375. Cover a baking pan with a sheet of aluminum foil (it makes clean up easier).

Wash the fish out. Stuff it full of whatever herbs you have. There's parsley in this picture. Cilantro is also good. Any herb more intense than these, go easy. Slice some lemons and shove them in every orifice. 

Slather the fish in olive oil, lay it on the baking sheet, into the oven it goes. As it cooks, you can baste it once or twice with its juices. Or not—it won't change things much if you forget.

You can tell it's done when the flesh flakes after it's flicked with a fork. If it's undercooked it will be very wet, the flesh layers indistinct. Don't overcook it, that's criminal. Slightly overcooked will be moist but have a tacky, sticky texture in your mouth. Way overcooked will be dry and nearly tough. I baked this bream about 30 minutes.

Serve as is. I don't even add any salt. Just maybe another drizzle of olive oil—a good one, you'll taste it—a squeeze of fresh lemon. Deliver it to the table whole. Use a fork and knife to peel back the skin and gently remove the flesh.

Bream, ready to serve. 

In Greece, with fish smaller than this, you may eat the eyes.

Is dolphin safe tuna better for the sea?

Here’s an interesting article about dolphin-safe tuna fishing. It throws into relief the unintended consequences of fixing the surface of a problem without addressing the root cause. It turns out that no matter how you lure tuna, whether it's safe for dolphins or not, if you’re fishing in a mass-attack style you’re going to kill a lot of other fish “unintentionally”.

Read the article through to the comments at the end. You’ll see the writer is restricting his conversation to one kind of fishing method. It’s not the only way to fish for tuna.

I checked in with Iker Fernandez, one of the folks behind our tuna from Ortiz. I thought his response was funny because the kind of tuna that Ortiz buys are fished traditionally. As much as we might be desensitized to expect these acts of aquatic carnage, he’s surprised, almost incredulous. He wrote, “I can assure 100% that our tunas are fished by line, one by one. I’d like to know what kind of tuna this writer is talking about!”