MrTinned Report, Issue 14, Saturday, 15 August 2026

The few millimetres of liquid, oil or brine or tomato, do not announce themselves as food. The fish goes into the can raw, unless it was grilled or smoked, and the lid goes on before any cooking has happened, so whatever was poured in alongside it is the thing the fish then gets cooked in, kept in, and quietly altered by for as long as the tin sits unopened. It is the one ingredient in there continuously doing a job.

A cannery seals first and cooks second, and that order is the whole trick. Once the lid is seamed on, the cans go into a retort, a big pressure vessel, and are held at somewhere around 116 to 121 degrees, long enough to sterilise everything inside. Nothing can be stirred or tasted or adjusted once they are in this state. The heat has to travel to the middle of the fish, and it travels through the liquid, which is why the liquid decides the cook and not just the taste. Brine carries heat faster than oil. In one trial on yellowfin, the brine-packed cans reached holding temperature in about fifteen minutes where the oil-packed took twenty-six. Same fish, same can, a slower and gentler cook, settled before the lid went on.

Then the exchange begins, and it runs both ways. Fat dissolves fat, so an oily fish in oil gives some of itself up to the oil around it, and analyses of oil-packed tuna have found that pouring that oil away takes a share of the fish's own omega-3s with it, gone from the flesh and sitting in the liquid it was sealed beside. Water-packed fish holds on to more of them, oil and water declining to mix, but the brine takes its own cut in the things that do dissolve in water, the salt-soluble savour that ends up in a liquid nobody keeps. Whatever the pack, the liquid always leaves with something. Oil is just the one where what is left is worth eating most.

Which is more or less the difference between the three. Olive oil is the Iberian and Breton answer, the slowest and the most protective, a medium that shields the fat from turning and lets a good tin go on softening and deepening for years, the quality the vintaging houses back in Issue 2 sell by the year. Brine is the plainest and is honest about it, handing you the fish and very little else, which is exactly what you want when the tin is heading into something that brings its own sauce. Tomato is not a neutral medium at all but a cooked sauce in its own right, acid and a little sweet, seasoning the fish rather than protecting it, and it is what most of the world's sardines are actually packed in, the everyday tin of Morocco and Portugal and the Baltic ports and the British table.

A cannery cannot make its fish better by changing what it pours in, but it can make the tin dearer or cheaper by a wide margin, because good olive oil costs a multiple of sunflower, and that is why the label draws such a careful line between olive oil, vegetable oil, and the blend that says both. Europe's marketing standard for preserved sardines even polices the pack itself: in an oil tin, the watery exudate that seeps out of the fish is not allowed to run past eight percent of the net weight. Even the leak is written into the law.

So the decision that gets the least attention in the aisle turns out to be the one with the most left to do. Everything a tin becomes between the cannery and your kitchen, it becomes through that liquid. Warm a good one, tip it out over the bread along with the fish, and understand that the pour is not a garnish. It is the other half of what you bought.

A small squid, stuffed with a larger one, by hand.

Issue 3 told the first half of this house's story: the Lazzara brothers walking away from their Italian fish factory in the 1920s rather than supply Mussolini's army. Here is what happened after. Carlo Lazzara's salting warehouse on the Rua do Godinho passed to his daughter Girolima and her husband, then to their son, who was sent to the colonial war and emigrated in the unsettled years after the 1974 revolution. Around 1977 he handed the firm and its brand to Fausto Cântara, who until then had kept the books at another Matosinhos cannery. Cântara's son runs it now. A house founded by a family leaving one dictatorship was passed on as another one fell.

The Cântara line is the artisan end of it, and this is the strangest tin on it. Small squid are stuffed by hand, one at a time, and what they are stuffed with is more squid: chopped giant calamari, with onion and rice, in a light tomato sauce. Nothing about it can be done by machine, which is why almost nobody makes it.

What arrives is closer to a small cooked dish than to a fish in oil. The little squid stay tender, the rice inside them takes up the sauce, and the whole thing eats like something that came out of a Portuguese kitchen rather than off a line. Warm the tin through and put it on bread, or tip it over plain rice and let the sauce carry it.

$48 for a pack of six at TinCanFish.