From G's to Chefs - One Fish, Two Fish

Stacia pulled the car into a snow-piled parking spot, nosed in toward a three foot drift, shifted into park, and turned off the engine. We were now 137 miles from home, halfway across town from the reason we’d even traveled in the first place, and we were about to see one of the best things in the city of Omaha: Whole Foods.

Just inside the front door was the produce department, which left us flabbergasted. There was more variety of fruit and vegetable than we’d ever seen in one place, many of which we’d never even heard of. And there was so much of everything, with numerous employees moving along the displays removing anything that wasn’t of utmost freshness. For a time we simply wandered through, pointing at fruits and vegetables and making oohing and aahing sounds.

After a while, we made our way back to the fish counter, which was my main motivation for going in the first place. I’m very big on sustainable food, much of which is easy to come by in Iowa by shopping directly from the farm for produce or meat. However, fish is pretty darn tricky, and you’re pretty much stuck with whatever Hy-Vee carries, sustainable or not (much of it is, but they could definitely do better). Following some serious browsing and deliberation amongst ourselves, we made our selections. Tacking on some produce and grocery items, we paid and headed out.

We’d thought ahead enough to bring a cooler along for the weekend, so we packed the fish and produce on ice and started the journey back. Once home, we froze what we could, put the rest in the fridge, and made plans to start utilizing the rest that night, before it started to spoil. It was, then, no surprise when at 5 o’clock I found myself staring down four whole, fresh sardines.

I’d never even eaten a sardine before yesterday, much less cleaned one, but hey, that’s what they invented the internet for, right? I found a sufficiently graphic website illustrating the process, laid down some newspapers, grabbed a sharp paring knife, and prepared to be entirely grossed out. But you know what? Well, I won’t lie, it actually was pretty nasty. :) I won’t go into too much detail, but the general procedure was as follows.

Chop off the head, pulling away with the knife to bring along some of the guts. Slit the belly and scrape out the remaining innards. Butterfly the fish flat, grab a hold of the tail and pull on it to lift out the entire backbone. Grab the skin and pull/scrape it off the rather small remaining fillets. Finally, hand the finished fillet to a disgusted-looking wife to rinse off and lay on a plate ready for cooking. Oh, and sardines are an “oily fish,” so this is all done with a slippery fish fillet, for added fun.

Now, if that sounds disgusting, it kind of is, but I am usually the first to get grossed out or queasy from something, and I was able to do all four fish. As Stacia said, she doesn’t mind if it looks like an animal, or if it looks like food, but she doesn’t want to be involved in the conversion process. Well, I converted four sardines, and after close to an hour of cleaning, we were left with 8 tiny fillets.

The recipe we used was pretty basic, a simple homemade tomato sauce, the sardines on top, bread crumbs on that, a few herbs, and a drizzle of wine, baked in the oven. We made some pasta to serve it on as a way to stretch it, but these were sardines we’re talking about, so it didn’t make much. When the kitchen timer finally chimed, we dished up a small amount of spaghetti, placed the essentially breaded sardines on top and garnished with the sauce. We then sat down and apprehensively stared down our first-ever sardine meal.

You know what the funny thing is, after all that work? When we tasted the dish, it really wasn’t too distinctive, one way or the other. I had no idea going in if I’d like sardines, but I thought for damn sure I’d have an opinion about them. I mean, they tasted fishy, I guess, but it wasn’t like salmon, or cod where there’s a unique flavor to the meat. I was fully prepared to love or hate sardines, but I was left thinking, “well, that’s okay.” Not quite what I expected.

Naturally this makes it hard to recommend using sardines in more food. They are abundant and caught in a way that doesn’t do much damage to the environment or harm to other species, so it’s a good choice for the planet. But it’s a whole lot of work to go from whole fish to fillet to dinner, and there’s not a lot of reward, flavor-wise for all the effort. I think sardines have a bit of a stigma from years of being a poor man’s food, in the little cans, so I feel compelled to defend them a little, but like their flavor, they don’t make a strong case one way or the other.

So, what did I learn from the sardine cooking adventure? For one thing, the closest ones are in Omaha, which isn’t exactly trivial. They aren’t my new favorite food, but I won’t need to feel frightened of them in the future. And, if it’s absolutely necessary, I can clean a fish without puking. That’s something I didn’t know before. Hopefully it doesn’t come in handy too often, though.