Description
Ingredients: Anchovies, extra virgin olive oil, vinegar, tuna, wine, sugar, mustard, spices, carrots, onions, salt.
The terms “spiced” and “spicy” are used pretty much interchangeably in the tinned fish world, to mean two different things: with a hot pepper (or hot pepper flavor), and with cloves/bay/carrot/hot pepper. There are many examples of both terms being used to mean both things.
We are so frustrated by how widespread this confusing inconsistent usage is that we’ve gone through our entire product line to correct the incorrect ones such that our description of “spiced” or “spicy” will always indicate which it really is, regardless of the packaging. “Spicy” = with hot pepper flavor. “Spiced” = with the cloves/bay/carrot/hot pepper flavors.
In this particular case, the spices contain no real heat, but are not of the traditional “bay/clove/carrot” variety, either. Still, we are correcting to “Spiced” because it is not what are calling “Spicy”.
Hream McDan (verified owner) –
Very unique. For me, it’s 3.5 stars out of 5 … high quality anchovies, high quality sauce that was fun to try. In the right recipe, I can easily see bumping up that score significantly.
Absolutely & definitely, this is *not* an eat-straight-from-the-tin item and it needs to be *in* something. What exactly is that … something? Not sure. I tried mine over rice and it was solid but not great. I imagine this really needs to go over pasta, as the sauce in this tin would mix wonderfully with a tin bit of marinara – not too much or else you’d lose the nuance of the sauce. Maybe on pizza, if you used some of the oil on the crust as well?
Spiced not spicy is a great descriptor. I did enjoy the sauce quite a bit. And to be sure, yes, these are salt-cured and extremely salty. If you have a special dish that needs a special salty/anchovy ingredient where you can leverage this sauce, then look no further. You’ve found it.