13 Sardine Recipes for Party Snacks and Tinned

By Anna Hezel

If there’s one pantry ingredient I always have (even more reliably than sugar, flour, or olive oil), it’s sardines. Sure, canned sardines can be a great souvenir from a trip or a compact gift for a seafood-loving friend. And having a collection of tins is a great excuse to buy yourself a fancy sardine fork. But these small nutrient-packed fish can also be turned into a million different salads, pastas, and snacks (trust me, I wrote a whole book’s worth of recipes for tinned seafood).

Here are some of our favorite recipes from cookbooks, the pages of Gourmet, and our own staff recipe developers, to turn canned sardines into meals all year round.

If you need to make a lot of hors d’oeuvres in a short amount of time, may I suggest these 5-ingredient sardine puffs? Like many sardine recipes, these make efficient use of a very short ingredients list and a brief cook time.

While you can (and should) snack on sardines straight from the can, you can also always give them a quick pan-fry before setting them on a plate of emerald-green salsa verde.

It doesn’t get much simpler than mashing together sardines with lemon juice and the best butter you can get your hands on.

Skip the crab cakes and make these out of halibut and canned sardines instead. A bright parsley–caper sauce ties the dish together.

This Sicilian-inspired pasta dish combines some heavy-hitting pantry ingredients with sweet onion and fennel, for a rustic seafood pasta that tastes like it took way longer to cook than it actually did.

For a tinned-fish meal full of color and flavor, roast some cherry tomatoes and fennel together on a sheet pan before tossing them with toasted pine nuts and almonds and canned sardines.

If you have some dill growing in your windowsill herb garden, you might not even need to make a trip to the store to make this sardine spaghetti.

This sardine recipe is like eating a salad on a piece of toast. After quick-pickling rounds of radish, carrot, and chile, it’s just a matter of toasting some baguette, opening a tin, and assembling.

Jarred peppers and capers complete these dainty sardine tartines. A squeeze of lemon and some hot sauce are optional.

Mix and match sardines and anchovies in these bites for a choose-your-own adventure snacking experience.

Everyone knows that tomato and mayo were made to be eaten together, but here, chef Renee Erickson takes the combo a step further by blending them together into an umami-rich spread for sardine toasts.

Why should anchovies get to have all the Caesar salad fun? This spin swaps in sardines.

Sardine recipes don’t have to be all about the fish, and these simmered beans with a sardine topping prove that less is sometimes more.

By Anna Hezel

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