A Tin Is Never Just a Tin: Inside Fangst and Ramón Peña
There is a point in any serious interest in conservas when the metal box starts to disappear.
You stop seeing sardines as something that came from a shelf and begin wondering which sardines, from which water, caught when, cooked how, packed by whom, and why this producer chose olive oil while another chose rapeseed. A mussel is no longer simply a mussel once you know that it spent its life hanging from a rope beneath a wooden platform in a Galician estuary. A little smoked sprat tastes different after you learn that Scandinavia once had a thriving canning industry built around fish just like it.
A Priori Distribution, one of our wonderful supplier partners at The Ambrosian Pantry, has a habit of opening that door.
Their virtual hangs bring retailers and other food people into the same room, or at least onto the same screen, with the people actually making the things on our shelves. It is one of those rare opportunities to move past a sell sheet and hear someone explain why a particular fish matters, why a recipe tastes the way it does, or what the production process actually looks like when nobody has condensed it into three lines of marketing copy.
For this particular hang, A Priori brought together two producers that could almost serve as bookends for the European conservas world.
From Denmark came Fangst, a young company working to revive and reinterpret the seafood-preservation traditions of northern Europe.
From Galicia came Ramón Peña, whose roots stretch back to 1920 in one of the great historic centers of Spanish canning.
We tasted our way from Baltic sprats and Danish trout to Galician xoubas, mussels and squid in ink while Fangst co-founder Rasmus and Ramón Peña's Daniel walked us through the places, people and decisions behind them.
The tins were excellent.
The more interesting part was everything that happened before the tins existed.
Why Fangst Looked North
Fangst means “catch” in Danish and Norwegian.
The company began with a question.
As great Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian conservas found their way into specialty shops and wine bars around the world, Scandinavia was in the middle of its own culinary awakening. The New Nordic movement had spent years digging into local grains, wild plants, fermentation, preservation and the character of the northern landscape.
Yet much of that attention stopped at the shoreline.
That seemed strange to Fangst's founders.
Denmark and its neighbors are surrounded by extraordinary fishing waters. Herring had helped shape Scandinavian commerce for centuries. Small sprats had supported a substantial northern European canning industry. Mussels, trout, salmon and other cold-water species were already part of everyday life.
The modern expression of those traditions had faded.
Fangst set out to bring one back.
The goal was never to make a Danish imitation of a Spanish sardine tin. Spain already does Spanish conservas exceptionally well.
Fangst wanted something that tasted unmistakably northern.
That decision reaches all the way down to the oil.
Why There Is Rapeseed Oil in a Fangst Tin
Olive oil makes immediate sense in a Mediterranean conserva. It belongs to the agricultural landscape surrounding the cannery.
Olive groves are harder to come by in Denmark.
Fangst uses cold-pressed organic rapeseed oil instead.
For an American customer, the word “rapeseed” can create some confusion because we tend to associate the plant with canola oil. The highly refined, intentionally neutral bottle of canola in a supermarket pantry is not a particularly good reference point for the cold-pressed oil Fangst uses.
This oil has flavor.
It is gently nutty and a little buttery. Rather than disappearing around the seafood, it becomes part of the recipe.
The same thinking led Fangst toward its seasonings.
Walk along the coast and look around.
Heather. Chamomile. Juniper. Ramson, or wild garlic. Dill. Thyme.
Plants and flavors with some connection to the place.
Fangst does use ingredients from outside Scandinavia where the recipe calls for them. Northern European cooking has absorbed pepper and other imported spices for centuries. There is no attempt to create an artificial culinary border around Denmark.
The point is simply that the tins should feel rooted somewhere.
That idea even carries into the boxes.
Rasmus described the Scandinavian coast in a palette of gray, blue and green. Then, against all that cool color, a flower or berry suddenly appears.
Look at a Fangst package and you can see the landscape he is talking about.
The boxes are restrained, almost severe, until the little burst of color in the center catches your eye.
Brisling No. 1
The first Fangst tin we opened was also the product with which the company began.
Fangst Brisling No. 1 contains small Baltic sprats, lightly smoked and packed in rapeseed oil with heather and chamomile.
Brisling is a Scandinavian name for the small sprat, Sprattus sprattus. You will sometimes see similar fish sold under the broad commercial language of sardines, but these are visibly different from the larger pilchards many people expect when they open a classic Iberian sardine tin.
Fangst embraces that difference.
These are tiny northern fish.
The heather and chamomile sound much louder on paper than they taste.
We expected the chamomile in particular to announce itself immediately. Instead, both botanicals sit behind the fish. The aroma is gently floral, the smoke is light, and the sprats still taste first and foremost like sprats.
Then you find an actual chamomile flower.
Rasmus admitted that he hunts for them when he eats the tin. Bite directly into one and the flavor suddenly comes into focus, still softened by the oil and fish around it.
The texture is another pleasant surprise for anyone uneasy about whole small fish. The sprats are packed with their skin and tiny bones intact, but the canning process softens the bones so thoroughly that they become part of the texture rather than an interruption to it.
Nothing about the tin feels accidental.
It is a Baltic fish, an old Scandinavian canning tradition, northern botanicals, restrained smoke and local oil all fitting into one small box.
The Strange Fate of the Humble Sprat
The discussion around Brisling No. 1 led to one of the afternoon's more interesting detours.
There is constant conversation in the seafood world about fishing pressure, changing stocks and the future availability of familiar species. Sardines in particular can produce alarming headlines when individual fisheries struggle.
The situation with northern sprats has another wrinkle.
A great many of the small fish caught in northern European waters never become food for people at all.
They are processed into fish meal and fish oil, much of which ultimately feeds other animals.
Rasmus's frustration with that system was obvious.
Here is a small, nutritious fish that people can eat directly. Instead, huge quantities move through another layer of the food chain first.
Part of Fangst's work, then, is culinary rehabilitation.
If people begin seeing a sprat as delicious food rather than an anonymous industrial input, the fish acquires a completely different value.
A well-made tin can help do that.
Herring, Reconsidered
Herring needs very little historical introduction in Scandinavia.
For centuries it was food, trade and livelihood. It remains a common part of Danish eating today.
For an American approaching herring for the first time, however, the category can be tricky.
A heavily pickled herring may be sweet, sour and salty all at once. Smoked versions can arrive with enough smoke to dominate everything else. Some people taste one forceful preparation and decide that herring itself is not for them.
Fangst SILD No. 1 makes a quieter case.
The herring comes from the Norwegian Sea and receives a light smoking before being packed with ramson and white pepper.
There is more going on in the seasoning than those two ingredients alone. The herbal mixture brings additional savory notes from ingredients including celeriac, horseradish, onion, chives and rosemary.
You do not taste them as a checklist.
They settle around the herring.
That restraint is central to Fangst. Smoke, herbs and oil are allowed to participate, but the fish is not asked to disappear beneath them.
Rasmus's pairing suggestion caught us off guard.
Provençal rosé.
Northern herring and southern French wine turn out to get along quite nicely.
The Trout That Won America
Then came Regnbue Ørred, Fangst's Danish freshwater rainbow trout with juniper and lemon thyme.
Among Fangst's American customers, this one has developed an unusually devoted following.
One bite explains most of it.
The trout flakes beautifully. It is rich without becoming heavy. Smoke sits lightly over the top. Juniper brings its familiar woodland character, while lemon thyme gives the whole thing a little lift.
Where the brisling may be the best introduction to Fangst's philosophy, the trout may be the easiest introduction to Fangst, period.
It also opened a worthwhile discussion about aquaculture.
The trout is farmed.
Fangst does not whisper that fact or dress it up.
Rasmus argued that seafood consumers have to move beyond the reflex that wild fish is automatically virtuous and farmed fish automatically suspect.
Aquaculture can cause serious environmental problems when it is handled badly. It can also be managed thoughtfully, with attention paid to stocking density, water, feed, disease, medication and surrounding ecosystems.
Wild fisheries have their own limits.
As global demand for seafood grows, good aquaculture will almost certainly remain part of the answer.
That does not mean giving every farm a free pass. It means asking better questions.
The trout Fangst uses comes from certified Danish freshwater aquaculture, with systems designed around careful management of the fish and their water.
Eating it does not feel like settling for a second choice.
It is simply a very good trout.
For a drink, Rasmus pointed toward another bottle full of juniper.
Gin.
Fair enough.
A Map Drawn in Cold Water
One of the pleasures of moving through the rest of Fangst's range is seeing its definition of “local” stretch across the broader northern seascape.
The company's ingredients take you into the Baltic, the Norwegian Sea, Danish fjords and freshwater systems, Icelandic waters and farther into the North Atlantic.
Greenland halibut brings another texture entirely. Mussels introduce the character of Danish coastal waters. Cod liver turns a part of the fish many Americans know primarily through nutritional supplements into something luxurious enough to put on toast.
The range feels less like a collection of isolated products than a map.
Follow the tins and you travel.
The Foie Gras of the Sea
After the main tasting, the conversation eventually reached one of Fangst's more unusual products: smoked cod liver.
Those words can divide a room.
Anyone whose childhood included a spoonful of cod liver oil may require some persuasion.
The tin deserves a clean slate.
Cod liver is extraordinarily rich. During processing, some of its natural oil renders out, leaving tender pieces of liver sitting in their own fat. The texture is soft enough to spread.
Fangst sometimes describes it as a kind of “foie gras of the sea,” which is a useful way to approach it.
Rasmus suggested blending the liver with a little crème fraîche and a splash of brandy or Cognac, then serving it with toasted sourdough.
Suddenly cod liver sounds considerably less medicinal.
It also fits a broader tradition in Iceland and the North Atlantic of finding uses for far more of each fish than the familiar fillets alone.
A whole animal went into the fishing boat.
There is no reason our cooking imagination should begin and end with two boneless pieces from its sides.
Then A Priori Took Us to Galicia
Halfway through the hang, the map swung south.
Very far south.
The herbs, oils and cold northern waters of Fangst gave way to one of the world's great conservas cultures.
Galicia occupies the northwest corner of Spain, where the Atlantic pushes into a remarkable network of coastal inlets called rías.
Fish and shellfish are woven deeply into the region's food culture.
So is preservation.
Ramón Peña's history reaches back to 1920.
Daniel joined the hang from Spain after the day's production had already ended. Since we could not walk through a working factory with him live, he had gone through the facility the previous day and filmed what was happening.
That footage changed the tasting.
A tin hits differently after you have watched somebody make it.
Inside Ramón Peña
Ramón Peña's current factory is modern, but much of the food moving through it would make sense to a cook from generations ago.
Fish arrive.
People clean them.
Scissors cut heads and tails.
Hands arrange each piece.
Vegetables are chopped.
Sauces cook.
Seafood is fried, boiled, stuffed or dried according to the preparation.
Only at the end does the industrial machinery take over for sealing and sterilization.
On the day Daniel filmed, workers were preparing skinless and boneless sardines, one of the more laborious products in the range.
The usual work of cleaning and preparing a sardine is only the beginning.
Each fish must also lose its skin. It is opened carefully and the backbone is removed, leaving clean sardine fillets to be packed by hand.
We throw around words such as “handmade” very casually in food.
Watching this made the word literal again.
The Fish Decides the Schedule
Daniel explained something else that is easy to miss when all you see is the finished product.
Ramón Peña buys fresh seafood through the local Galician fish markets.
That means the production plan follows the catch.
The cannery cannot simply decide that tomorrow will be sardine day and assume nature will comply.
Quality and availability dictate what can be purchased. Purchasing determines what can be produced.
During periods when several important species are running at once, the factory has another problem. There are only so many production days and only so many skilled hands.
Some days become sardine days.
Some become mussel days.
The schedule follows the sea.
For shoppers accustomed to products appearing on demand twelve months a year, this can feel almost inefficient.
It is also one reason the tins taste the way they do.
Xoubas and the Problem With the Name “Sardines in Sauce”
The first Ramón Peña tin in our tasting has an English description that does it almost no favors.
Correct, technically.
Then Daniel showed us how it is made.
The fish are xoubas, the Galician word for small sardines.
They are cleaned with scissors, dusted in flour and fried. Meanwhile, a sauce develops from ingredients including onion, pepper and tomato.
The inspiration comes from one of Galicia's great home-cooked dishes, the empanada de xoubas.
Now “sardines in sauce” starts to sound rather silly.
This is closer to opening a little piece of a Galician kitchen.
The frying matters. You can see traces of the coating clinging to the fish. The vegetables matter. The sauce has the depth of something cooked rather than merely added.
Daniel introduced us through the factory video to the cook responsible for Ramón Peña's sauces.
He has apparently tried more than once to pry exact recipes from her.
He has not succeeded.
We respect her position completely.
The tin does not need the secret written on the label.
It tastes like somebody knows it.
Cook With the Tin, Not Just Around It
Daniel gave us homework.
Take the xoubas and make an empanada.
That suggestion gets at something we wish more people understood about conservas and tinned fish.
A good tin can be a finished dish.
It can also be an ingredient.
The cooking that happened at the cannery saves you from starting at the beginning. The fish has already been cleaned, fried and married to its sauce.
You are not cheating by using it.
You are beginning halfway through a recipe because somebody in Galicia already completed the first half.
Under a Galician Batea
Next came mussels in escabeche.
Daniel's presentation left the factory and went underwater.
Across the Galician rías are large wooden floating platforms called bateas. From above, they can look almost austere. Their real life is underneath.
Long ropes descend from the structures into the water. Mussels attach themselves and grow along them in dense clusters.
Seen below the surface, a batea begins to resemble an underwater farm hanging vertically through the sea.
The rías provide remarkably productive conditions for shellfish. Protected coastal waters mix with Atlantic influence and nutrient flows, supporting an industry that has become inseparable from Galician food.
Understanding that landscape makes the next tin easier to appreciate.
Mussels in escabeche are not simply shellfish submerged in a red sauce.
They begin as a crop suspended beneath those wooden platforms.
The Milk Frother Trick
This may be the single most immediately useful thing we learned all afternoon.
Open a tin of mussels in escabeche and the sauce may have separated during its time on the shelf.
Oil sits apart from the other components. The color can look deep red and slightly broken.
Daniel poured the liquid into a glass.
Then he took a handheld milk frother to it.
A few seconds later, the escabeche had become a smooth orange emulsion.
Back over the mussels it went.
Nothing added.
Nothing cooked.
The sauce was simply brought back together.
We will never look at a separated tin of escabeche the same way again.
Squid in Ink, One Squid at a Time
The final factory sequence was the one we kept thinking about afterward.
Ramón Peña was making squid in its ink.
Watching the process makes the small squid inside the finished tin suddenly seem improbable.
Each one begins with cleaning.
The head and eyes are removed. The body is prepared. The tentacles are cleaned and then tucked back inside, creating a neat little stuffed squid.
Then they are cooked.
At that point the factory has another problem.
Squid holds water.
If too much of that water escapes later inside the tin, the ink sauce becomes diluted.
So the cooked squid is dried before packing.
Only after that does it meet the sauce.
The sauce itself begins with a cooked base before the squid ink transforms it into the glossy black preparation we recognize.
Hands place the squid into tins.
Sauce follows.
Then sealing and sterilization finish what the cooks started.
It is difficult to watch the entire process and continue thinking of canned squid as convenience food in the usual sense.
It is convenient for us.
It was not convenient for the people making it.
Arroz Negro in About the Time It Takes to Cook Rice
Daniel's favorite use for the squid is beautifully straightforward.
Cook rice.
Fold in the squid and its ink sauce.
Add a little aioli.
You now have the beginnings of arroz negro with almost none of the difficult seafood preparation happening in your own kitchen.
This may be the best argument for keeping serious conservas in the pantry.
They do not replace cooking.
They expand what you can cook on a Tuesday night.
Seasonality Does Not Stop at the Cannery Door
As the two producers talked, a common theme kept surfacing.
The sea imposes limits.
A product can be popular and still disappear.
A particular fish may have a short season. Shellfish harvesting can be interrupted by environmental conditions. One year can look different from the next.
Ramón Peña's commitment to Galician sourcing makes those limits especially real.
If the right seafood is not available from the place they rely on, there may simply be no production.
That is a hard idea to reconcile with modern retail, where success usually creates an expectation of infinite replenishment.
Sell twice as much?
Make twice as much.
That logic works much better for phone chargers than sardines.
Conservas Have Vintages Too
Someone in the conversation compared this kind of production to wine.
The analogy works surprisingly well.
Nobody expects a winery to recreate a past vintage after the grapes are gone.
The harvest happened.
The fruit became wine.
That year's quantity now exists in a fixed amount.
Seafood has its own version of a vintage.
A sardine season arrives.
The cannery buys what meets its standards.
Those fish become tins.
Then the season passes.
Demand may later soar. A wonderful review may appear. A shop may sell through a year's expected inventory in a month.
The sea does not reopen the season as a courtesy.
Once you understand that, an unavailable conserva becomes less frustrating.
It starts to feel agricultural.
Because it is.
What Rasmus and Dani Actually Want to Eat
Toward the end of the hang, the A Priori team asked both producers to put aside commercial considerations and name the tins they personally love.
Rasmus chose Fangst's smoked Limfjord blue mussels.
His affection for mussels reaches back to childhood, when he gathered them with his mother from bridge pilings and brought them home to cook.
He thinks people underestimate mussels.
So do we.
A good mussel can be sweet, briny, deeply savory and remarkably satisfying. Fangst keeps the smoke controlled so it sits alongside the shellfish instead of covering it.
Daniel went with zamburiñas, the small Galician scallops.
They are another classic Galician empanada filling and one of the products he returns to himself.
There is useful information in a producer's bestseller.
There is often better information in what they eat after work.
The Sustainability Conversation Gets Complicated Quickly
The closing discussion wandered into seafood sustainability, where simple answers tend to fall apart under scrutiny.
Fangst works with both wild and farmed seafood.
Rasmus made a case for judging aquaculture by how it is actually practiced rather than dismissing the entire category.
That position will become increasingly difficult to avoid.
Wild fisheries are finite. Seafood demand is enormous. Aquaculture already supplies a huge share of what the world eats.
The question is how to do it well.
At the same time, Daniel described the uncertainty faced by a company committed to harvesting within one specific region.
Conditions change.
Shellfish areas can close.
A fishing season can disappoint.
A species can become difficult enough to source that a beloved product simply does not get made.
Ramón Peña cannot solve that problem by quietly buying the same species from the other side of the world and leaving the label unchanged.
Place is part of the product.
Neither producer pretended that the future of seafood has an easy answer.
We appreciated that.
Once You See the Hands, the Tin Changes
The lasting image from the afternoon was not a beautiful sardine or a perfectly arranged plate.
It was hands.
Hands holding scissors.
Hands cleaning fish.
Hands removing sardine bones.
Hands stuffing tentacles into squid.
Hands placing seafood into metal boxes one piece at a time.
We spend so much time talking about provenance in specialty food that the word can begin to lose its shape.
Then someone shows you the actual work.
Suddenly the price of a tin means something different.
So does a shortage.
So does a crooked little fish that was clearly packed by a person rather than calibrated into place by a machine.
A tin can look industrial simply because it is metal.
The food inside may be anything but.
Where We Would Begin
If you are new to Fangst, start with the freshwater rainbow trout if you want the easiest introduction.
It is rich, flaky, gently smoky and immediately likable.
Then open Brisling No. 1.
That is the tin that explains Fangst.
Small Baltic fish. Rapeseed oil. Heather. Chamomile. Smoke. Scandinavia compressed into a rectangle.
If herring has scared you away before, SILD No. 1 is worth a try too. Its lighter smoke and herbal seasoning show a much gentler side of the fish.
And do not ignore the mussels.
Rasmus certainly doesn't.
With Ramón Peña, we would happily begin with the humble-sounding Sardines in Sauce.
Keep the bread nearby.
Then move into the mussels in escabeche and try Daniel's frother trick before you eat them.
And when you see zamburiñas, remember which tin Daniel picked for himself.
North and South
Fangst and Ramón Peña are separated by geography, history and culinary language.
Fangst is a young Danish company working out what a modern Nordic conserva tradition can look like.
Ramón Peña comes from Galicia, where making extraordinary seafood last beyond the day's catch is already part of the cultural furniture.
One reaches for rapeseed oil, juniper and chamomile.
The other reaches for olive oil, peppers, onions and squid ink.
One is recovering something.
The other is carrying something forward.
Spend an afternoon eating with both and their common ground becomes much more interesting than their differences.
They care where the seafood comes from.
They care how it is handled.
They allow seasons to remain seasons.
They leave room for human judgment.
They understand that preserving food should not mean removing its character.
And they make a persuasive case for looking a little longer at the next tin you open.
The pull tab is only the final step.
By then, most of the story has already happened.
Explore the tins: Shop our complete Fangst collection, browse Ramón Peña, or wander through the full tinned fish and conservas collection at The Ambrosian Pantry.
