Learning how to cook with anchovies takes your food to the next level – here’s why
By Joanna Sarah-Freedman
17 Dec 2020
3m
If you’ve ever been freaked out by anchovies, you’re not alone.
Given all the horrible things that can happen if you eat anything from the ocean past its best, old sea creatures should always be treated with caution.
However, as every cook knows, there are no absolutes in the kitchen. While one fermented fish might glue you to the toilet for days, another, properly prepared, might transform your dinner from bland to brilliant.
With this in mind, it’s time to talk about anchovies.
How to cook with anchovies
Like mackerel, sardines and herrings, anchovies are part of a group of small oily swimmers that can make culinary magic. Delicious in their own right, the fish really comes into its own when it has been preserved.
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There are lots of way to cook with anchovies. You can bury them in salt, drown them in olive oil, or even leave them in a well-aged wooden barrel. Then, you can create a range of ingredients that can take any meal to the stratosphere. All you need is a little faith.
Take tomato sauce, for instance. While dousing your penne in red juice that smells like a fishmongers bin is at the top of nobody’s menu, in moderation, the addition of a few diced anchovy fillets creates a depth of salty flavour. And it’s sure to make seasoning your dinner as simple as opening a tomato tin.
Finely chop the fillets, add them to your pan at the beginning and watch as they evaporate into a puddle of seriously savoury flavour. It’s this impact – delivered without any overly fishy side-effects – that makes anchovies such an important ally in the kitchen.
Understanding how to cook with anchovies can add an incredible twist to dozens of different dishes (Credit: Twisted)
What do anchovies taste like?
It’s not just sauces where the little fish can make their presence felt. If you want to include a satisfyingly salty element to a roasted meat joint, simply rub a few diced fillets around the outside of your meat.
Once cooked, the result will be a thin coating of delicious crunchy flakes that taste more like supercharged pork scratchings than something that’s come from the sea. This trick works particularly well with lamb.
What dishes go well with anchovies?
Given how much punch they pack, anchovies are best used together with dishes that have a strong flavour of their own. Covering a delicately flakey seabass with anchovy extract will obliterate everything. It will probably still taste good, just not of seabass.
This is why anchovies can make an excellent addition to hearty, cheesy comfort foods such as pizza and pasta. Sure, some might see it as sacrilegious to top a slice of pie with fish. But the combination of a salty fillet, melted mozzarella and doughy crust really takes things up a notch.
The history of cooking with anchovies
Still feeling sceptical about the secret power of anchovies? Well, you should know that they’ve actually been indispensable parts of the menu for thousands of years.
Long before we could complain about the purity of pizza, the ancient Romans covered everything they could get their hands on in the anchovy-based condiment garum, proving that we’ve always been susceptible to the fish’s salty charms.
Give anchovies a chance
In fact, our obsession has continued well into the modern-day.
Popular condiments such as fish sauce and Lea & Perrins are all derived from the fermented little fillets, providing yet more evidence that we can’t get enough added anchovy flavour.
Even if you consider yourself a fishy sceptic, this delicious body of evidence should be enough to get you to dip your toe in the water. You won’t regret it.
