When you’re hankering for tinned sardines, nothing else will do. While canned tuna is lean and mean, sardines are delightfully rich. Beef of the sea! Sardines are caught and enjoyed all over the world, and, like many of its tinned fish brethren, canned sardines have seen an uptick in popularity since 2020.
However, the term sardine doesn’t refer to a specific species of fish. As Anna Hezel, author of Tin to Table, explains, “There are a handful of species allowed to be packaged as ‘sardines,’” such as sprat, herring, and other small fish that exist toward the bottom of the food chain. Sardines aren’t predators, but that’s a good thing; because they eat heaps of plankton, they’re particularly low in mercury, unlike many other fish.
Sardines are typically packed in water, olive oil, or soybean oil. They’re also available flavored, often with lemon, tomato, or chiles; and sometimes lightly smoked. Some sardines are deboned and skinned before packaging; others are not. Your choices are a matter of taste, of course.
Generally, sardines packed in olive oil will have more flavor than those packed in a more neutral liquid, and sardines packed bone-in and skin-on will be more firm. Sardine bones don’t provide any significant crunch, according to Hezel. “I prefer to buy sardines with skin and bones,” she says, “Partially, because the skin and bones have a lot of good nutritional benefits. Also, it’s an aesthetic experience to open the can see all these perfectly tiled sardines.” Since the sardines are canned at high pressure and temperature, she says, the bones all but dissolve during the process.
To find the best canned sardines—ones with strong flavor, a meaty flake, and oceany brine—we set up a blind taste test for a panel of Bon Appétit staffers. After a pungent and opinionated 45 minutes, we came away with three tins we’d be thrilled to buy again.
How we set up our blind taste test
Before tasters took their first bites, I asked them to share how they most often enjoyed tinned sardines. Many said they appreciate the bold flavor a sardine can bring to a dish, without requiring a lot of effort—just open the can and you’re set. Others said they relied on sardines as a pantry powerplayer; a shelf-stable protein that can add heft to pantry pastas and juiced-up toasts alike.
To make sure our editors tasted an uncompromised bite of each contender, they sampled the sardines one by one, with no accompaniment but plain saltine crackers. And to ensure each sample tasted distinct from the next, our testers cleansed their palates with apple slices (honeycrisp, if you must know). We began by tasting each of our 10 sardines, then narrowed down to our favorites for a second round, after which we determined our winners.
How we picked the products
For many of our taste tests, we focus on items available in grocery stores across the country. But many grocery stores carry only a small selection of tinned sardines, and many brands are sold exclusively in specialty stores or online retailers. To get a broad sample of the sardine market, we sourced several tins commonly available in supermarkets, as well as some more niche brands.
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