I like to think of myself as a bit of a connoisseur of tinned seafood, and of tinned sardines, in particular. Well, of course I do: I’m Spanish, after all, and I’ve been eating this stuff since I was two (which, let me tell you, is a very long time ago indeed!). So I jumped at the chance to do a blind tasting of British supermarket tinned sardines – although, with the odd exception, I now think I perhaps jumped just a little too soon.
For me, the first thing you notice when you open a tin of sardines is the look of the fish, and then its smell and texture. They should be headless but otherwise whole, not boned fillets or skinned, and the flesh should feel firm to the touch; the bones, likewise, should still have some structure and substance to them (if you can barely feel them, the fish is likely overcooked). What I found especially illuminating about this blind tasting, however, was that three of the 10 products were pretty much identical, in pretty much every way, from the texture and taste of the fish to the quality of the oil, which is why I found it more or less impossible to tell them apart, or to find any points of difference between them.
