Salsa
The salsas can be traditional sauces from the regions where the fish is from. Salsa verde is a traditional fish sauce across northern Spain and we see it accompanying Cantabrian cannery Alaunga’s hake and hake cheeks and Galicia’s Los Peperetes’s sea bass. Los Peperetes leans into the sauce's homegrown roots and adds a glug of Albariño wine, made from the white grape native to the Rías Baixas.
Nuri melds Portuguese and Nuri tradition with its limited-edition stewed sardines. Caldeirada is a traditional ragout-style Portuguese stew and also a recipe from the Nuri archives that the cannery is revisiting.
The salsas and sauces also play with fusion cuisine, borrowing recipes from around the world. Zallo zhuzhes its Bonito del Norte with teriyaki sauce and wakame seaweed. Diplomats looks to Italy and adds pistachio sauce to its Baltic Sea sprats. And Mitch Tonks has created a squid ink sauce to accompany Rockfish’s squid from the English south coast. A nod to Spain, where the squid is canned.
Serving tips
•Take advantage of the fact that some heavy flavour lifting has already been done in-house and enjoy the tins simply heated through (or not) and loaded onto toast.
•Grill Ramon Pena’s stewed xouba sardines to crisp up the lightly battered skins of the sardines and enjoy with new potatoes, roasted Mediterranean vegetables, or on toast.
•Whisk the salsa verde in Alalunga’s hake cheeks tin to make an emulsion and drizzle over the hake cheeks.
