There's a farmers market here in Zurich where some Italians drive up and sell Italian products like cheeses, sausages, etc. but one thing I buy from them I've never seen anywhere else - they are rotten salted anchovies packed with peppercorns. Stink super bad and are falling apart but when you're making a sauce you drop one in and the anchovy dissolves and delivers tons of umami - glutamates - and you no longer smell the rotten fish smell. I'm sure professional chefs must know about these.
I keep them in baggies in the freezer so that they don't stink up the fridge.
Salt-cured anchovies. They're not rotten at all—they're spectacular! They're perfect on pizza, with fresh tomatoes, and in countless other dishes, either rinsed straight from the jar or melted into a sauce while cooking.
Where I live (a small seaside town), everyone makes their own jars of salt-cured anchovies. They are traditionally sealed with a loose lid consisting of a slate disc with a stone or other weight on top. They need to mature while still being able to breathe, and they must always remain covered by the proper amount of salt.
(The way you describe yours—as extremely smelly and falling apart—doesn't really suggest they're high quality. Normally, a properly cured anchovy should remain almost completely intact, so you can remove the tail and backbone and end up with two whole fillets. The peppercorns are a bit unusual as well.)
"...a delicious traditional variation, typical for example of the town of Fuscaldo in Calabria, where small oily fish are layered with salt and whole black peppercorns, or prepared with black pepper and chili peppers..."
This is one of the most wonderful things about traditional Italian food: every town has its own version of almost everything. And, of course, everyone passionately defends the idea that theirs is the only truly authentic one, while all the others are inferior imitations. It's part of the fun.
Where I live, people actually go on "hunts" for great food. We make yearly trips just to buy a particular product because "only that place makes it perfectly." Then we bring it home, talk about it with family and friends, compare producers, debate which one is best... There's an entire culture built around the pursuit of exceptional food.
>(The way you describe yours—as extremely smelly and falling apart—doesn't really suggest they're high quality. Normally, a properly cured anchovy should remain almost completely intact, so you can remove the tail and backbone and end up with two whole fillets. The peppercorns are a bit unusual as well.)
Being a consumer of jarred anchovies available in Australia(likely not the best quality)… I’ve never once gotten a whole fillet out intact!!
Rotten? Do you have any more info about this product, even a name? Salted anchovies are common in at least Spain, Italy & Portugal (and you usually rinse off the excess salt and optionally store them in olive oil for a while before consuming), but I've never seen a "rotten" anchovy...
Instead of "rotten" I should have probably used "fermented". They're dark brown, not dry but not in a liquid, individual anchovies that are starting to fall apart. They smell like a stronger version of fish sauce.
This but also with pepper corns?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23QDS0xclw4
Yeah, rough-ground peppercorn.
Why not just use colatura di alici?
I prefer not to cook that because I like the taste of it very much. I use it like Roman soldiers used to use it - a liquid that you put on whatever you're eating, like we use ketchup now.
I think the Italian fish sauce is much softer and more refined than Asian fish sauces.
If it's the salted anchovies I'm thinking of what I'm thinking of (like in the yt video in your sibling comment), salted anchovies are a lot cheaper and more versatile (the downside is that more processing is required on your end). Colatura is great in sauces, but you can use whole anchovy filets to make a gilda in addition to adding flavor to a sauce.
I mean, instead of investing so much effort to get glutamate into your food, why not use MSG directly? Sounds like much less hassle? Reminds me of the time when Big Food over here in Germany replaced MSG with "yeast extract" so they could claim that their foods contained no artificial flavor enhancers (although the yeast extract also contains a lot of glutamate).
Its also a common misconception that all glutamates are MSG (thats one salt of glutamate) and that all umami compounds are simple glutamate salts.
So while MSG is an excellent "neutral" umami ingredient, fermented products like this have a whole host of complex flavors that are often very desirable beyond just their glutamate salt.
Because people like the fish flavor ?
Same reason we use tomato paste instead of a MSG + food coloring or parmesan instead of MSG + some protein I would say.
Like labelling bacon nitrate free while also including celery seed something-or-another that is... Just nitrates.
While your comment is true, it is reductive. While celery seed does in fact contain nitrates which are turned into nitrites, it’s the next step that’s important. Unlike synthetic sodium nitrite, celery seeds contain vitamin C which acts as an antioxidant that converts the nitrites into harmless nitric oxide whereas the synthetic sodium nitrite is converted into harmful nitrosamines.
The subtle differences in how our bodies process synthetic vs natural ingredients significantly impacts our bodies and health.
>celery seeds contain vitamin C which acts as an antioxidant that converts the nitrites into harmless nitric oxide whereas the synthetic sodium nitrite is converted into harmful nitrosamines.
This just sounds like post hoc justification. There's hardly any vitamin C in celery seeds[1][2]. Broccoli has 5x the vitamin C per 100g, despite much of it being water. Moreover, if the point is that vitamin C protects against nitrates, why not add vitamin C directly, rather than doing it in a roundabout way by adding celery seeds which also happen to contain vitamin C?
[1] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/food-details/170920/nutrients
[2] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/food-details/170379/nutrients
I’m in no way implying or arguing celery seeds contain a great amount of vitamin C. There are of course many foods that contain more vitamin C than celery seeds. I’m stating that the naturally occurring vitamin C in celery seeds is the key difference between natural and synthetic nitrites.
I guess for me it just comes down to going back to basics. Why use multiple synthetic ingredients if a natural alternative exists. There are thousands of synthetic chemicals in the American food supply and we just don’t entirely know how they’re affecting our bodies.
>I’m stating that the naturally occurring vitamin C in celery seeds is the key difference between natural and synthetic nitrites
The original comment was about products being misleadingly labeled "nitrate free". The fact that celery seeds might have some mitigating vitamin C doesn't change this, any more than it would still be misleading to label with synthetic nitrates added as "nitrate free" if they also added vitamin C to it. Therefore I still think the tidbit about celery seeds containing vitamin C is post hoc justification. The rest of your comment also seems to confirm this, you think that celery seeds is intrinsically better than nitrates, because it's "natural".
Ok
Maybe because people still want to eat food. The culture of trying to re-engineer life is not it.
>The culture of trying to re-engineer life is not it.
What does this even mean? Cured meats (via nitrates or celery seeds) is already an engineered product.
why have the bacon at all when you could just eat straight protein powder or soylent though?
if you get both the nitrates and vitamin c from the cellery seeds, why bother going through the industrial processes for making the nitrates and vitamic c separate, possibly also from celery seeds, only to put them back together at the end?
It's almost certainly cheaper to synthesize nitrates and vitamin C separately than to farm celery seeds.
>possibly also from celery seeds
It's not. Like MSG (the white crystal kind), vitamin C is produced by microbes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monosodium_glutamate#Productio...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstein_process
They can't actually label it "nitrate free", only a superficially sounding term like "no nitrates added", with the hope that people (like you) think it's the same as "nitrate free".
I typically see it labeled "uncured."
>I mean, instead of investing so much effort to get glutamate into your food, why not use MSG directly?
Because the various uammi sources also add other flavors. I like being able to choose between soy sauce, fish sauce, worcestershire sauce, soy bean paste, mushroom powder, anchovies, chicken powder, yeast extract, and, yes, msg (with 2% i&g) because each of them affects the recipe i'm working with differently. Is your diet nothing but chicken breast, raw flour and shortening because they're the simplest sources of protein, carbs and fat?
> I mean, instead of investing so much effort to get glutamate into your food, why not use MSG directly?
HN never disappoints when it comes to bizarre takes.