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.

Where would this baked pasta be without its anchovy cream sauce? Nowhere.

Photograph by Laura Murray, food styling by Rebecca Jurkevich, prop styling by Sophie Strangio

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.

For three seasons on FX’s The Bear, actor and comedian Joel McHale portrayed an abusive chef so realistically, it was triggering to real-life kitchen workers. But aside from one short stint working at a Seattle deli under a manager with an incredibly short fuse (“This guy was a screamer—and he was fired,” McHale says), the kitchen has been a place of joy for McHale.

“If I’m home, I’m the cook,” says McHale, who also hosts the Fox cooking competition series Crime Scene Kitchen and is a spokesperson for Seattle’s Best Coffee. “I am very good at cooking meat.” In fact, he tells me he has plans immediately following our interview to roast a couple chickens for guests he has joining him for dinner.

Last year, in what McHale calls “one of [his] finest cooking moments,” he got to show off his steak-searing skills as a guest on restauranteur and chef (and friend) David Chang’s Netflix show, Dinner Time Live. “I was not expecting you, on live TV, to actually cook a beautiful steak,” Chang said on the show. “And I’m wrong.”

Below, McHale shares some of the tools and gear he uses to master the grill as well as the pantry items he always keeps stocked.

A monster smoker

McHale takes his meat smoking seriously—and that means using some pretty serious tools. “I have a Pitts and Spitts, a brand out of Texas, which is as tough as a Sherman tank,” he says. “I can smoke a pork tenderloin like nobody’s business, and a few months ago I made a Chateaubriand.”

Other favorite recipes in McHale’s rotation: “For Thanksgiving, I smoked a bunch of tri-tips. Two nights ago, I made [this dish where] I take a whole chicken breast with the skin and part of the bone, then season them up a little bit, sear the outsides off, and then I put them into a tomato and Iberico ham sauce.”

Instructions from an all-star

For burgers, McHale says he uses Gordon Ramsay’s burger blend method—a 70/20/10 ratio, with 70% chuck steak, 20% short rib, and 10% fat, as Ramsay explained on Masterchef.

Good, old-fashioned tongs

“I had a whole argument with David Chang about tongs,” says McHale. “He thinks tongs are amateur hour.” But McHale has no shame in using the tool—”I’ll send [Chang] photos of tongs resting on the side of a dish,” he says—especially in a pinch.

“When I cooked the steak for Dinner Time Live, [using the tongs] had to be done because I only had, like, 25 minutes,” McHale says. To get a beautiful, golden crust on the steak, “I salted the hell out of it and put it in oil. Then I put weight on top of the meat to spread it out, and flipped it.” McHale finished his dish by frying eggs in the beef fat left in the pan for steak and eggs.

Ghee and Wagyu beef tallow

For cooking fat, McHale likes to use Wagyu beef tallow or ghee. “Using ghee makes you look like a cook,” he says.

A caffeine fix

“I grew up in Seattle, where I worked at a coffee cart for years and drank tons of coffee,” says McHale. “I continue to—I probably had eight cups so far this morning, which is about average.”

While Seattle’s Best beans take McHale on a trip down memory lane, he’s also recently been enjoying one of the brand’s new launches. “For the summer, Seattle’s Best released all these limited edition Coffee Roast Mallows” in collaboration with XO Marshmallow, says McHale. “All the marshmallow flavors are inspired by the different blends of their coffee”—which, it turns out, is exactly where McHale likes to put them. (Why should hot cocoa get all the fun?)

A supply of ramen

Much like a munchie-fueled college student, McHale always has a stash of instant ramen on hand—although his go-to brand is a little more gourmet than Cup Noodles. “Chang’s Momofuku ramen is amazing,” says McHale, who snacks on them at night instead of dessert. “They’re in my closet right now. Well, the pantry, not my closet—they’re not just in there with my winter gear.”

Find more grilling and smoking must-haves

Tuna occupies an odd spot in the American food consciousness. We tend to think of it as either a humble canned good—bone-dry and flavorless unless it’s cut heavily with mayo—or a luxury seafood to be consumed mainly in the form of sushi or sashimi at Japanese restaurants. But given the relative ease these days of finding high-quality, oil-packed imported canned tuna, incorporating the pantry-staple version into your cooking is more appealing and easier than ever. (If you’re concerned about eating sustainably, and/or mercury contamination, you’ll definitely want to do your research before buying any kind of tuna to learn what species are best for you and the planet.)

As delicious as tuna salad is, there are many other exciting ways to cook with the canned fish. To inspire you to get out of a tuna rut, we’ve assembled a list of 16 recipes where canned tuna is the star, including savory spaghetti puttanesca, a vibrant summer tomato salad, and tuna-stuffed peppers.

July 2019