Anchovies aren’t shy, but that’s what makes them great. Wonderfully briny and particularly savory, these tiny fish pack potent flavor. They play a starring role in dishes like Caesar Salad, enriching the creamy dressing with a deep umami taste. In pantry-friendly recipes like Anchovy Pasta With Garlic Breadcrumbs, they blend seamlessly with other staples to become greater than the sum of their parts. Often, they’re relegated to the shadows: the secret ingredient that makes…well, most things taste better.
Anchovies and other tinned and jarred fish, as we know them, date back to 1795. In desperate need of shelf-stable foods to feed his armies, Napoléon Bonaparte offered a reward of 12,000 francs to anyone who could invent a new method of food preservation. As cookbook author Anna Hezel writes in Tin to Table, “Nicolas Appert rose to the challenge, and spent the next fourteen years figuring out how to preserve prepared foods by heating them inside glass jars, and sealing those jars against intruding microbes.”
But before they’re canned, jarred, or tinned, anchovies—a term that encompasses more than 140 species of fish—swim the ocean in large schools. While many commercially available fish are farmed, anchovies are primarily sourced from wild schools across the globe, from Peru to the Mediterranean. Fishermen use enormous nets to catch big bundles of these various species before processing them.
Because of anchovies’ naturally high concentration of fat, which can oxidize and spoil if not addressed, it’s critical to start the curing process soon after they’re caught. Producers must dispatch and clean the anchovies before layering them with salt, where they’ll rest for up to 12 months. Curing breaks down some of the fish’s proteins, tenderizing the fillets in the process.
At this stage, the anchovies can be packaged with the salt they were cured in, or they can be rinsed, deboned, filleted, packed into tins or jars, and covered in oil. We prefer anchovies packed in 100% extra-virgin olive oil, but any culinary oil can be used for this process.
Many people think of cured anchovies as a shelf-stable product. But, while the salt curing kills harmful bacteria, it doesn’t eliminate all microbial activity. This is all to say: Refrigerate your anchovies, people. And as you use the oil from the tin or jar, top off the container with more oil so the fish remain completely submerged until you’ve made your way through each and every one.
How we picked the products
A myriad of anchovy tins and jars line grocery store shelves these days, but which brand of anchovies is the best? We sampled nine brands of this pantry power player to find our favorites.