Ingredients · Tinned fish
Tinned sardines (in tomato sauce)
How long it keeps
About 24 months unopened
Once opened, about 2 days, refrigerated.
Source (unopened): FoodKeeper (USDA), 372 Canned goods, low acid (such as meat, poultry, fish, gravy, stew, soups, beans, carrots, corn, pasta, peas, potatoes, spinach), 2–5 Years · https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/fsis-foodkeeper-data
Source (once opened): https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/how-to-chill-freeze-and-defrost-food-safely/how-to-chill-freeze-and-defrost-food-safely
What ends it. The food and the tin slowly react. That changes taste and texture rather than making it unsafe.
How to make it last longer
Sardines in tomato sauce
Sardines in tomato sauce are oily fish, and that is the point of them. The NHS
says a healthy diet should include at least one portion of oily fish a week,
around 140 g, and names sardines among them
(NHS). On a long-life diet, a tin of sardines is the easiest way
to meet that.
Per 100 g with their sauce, CoFID records 18.5 g of protein and about 3 g of
omega-3 fatty acids. Omega-3 is one of the few nutrients a cupboard of tins and
dried goods genuinely runs short of, and oily fish is where nearly all of it
comes from. The NHS also notes that canned sardines contain bones you can eat.
Cooking with them
The sauce is a seasoning, not a filler: it goes into the dish with the fish.
Sardine and tomato curry builds a curry
on it, and
sardine and breadcrumb pasta breaks
the fish through pasta with crisp crumbs for crunch.
How long they keep
USDA FoodKeeper gives low-acid tins, fish included, two to five years; we
plan on two. Once opened, the Food Standards Agency advises against storing
food in the tin (FSA). Decant, refrigerate and eat within two
days.
Per 100 g there is 315 mg of sodium, about 0.8 g of salt: between the NHS’s
low and high marks, so taste before seasoning.
Storage
Cool, dark. The sauce is a seasoning, not a filler: it goes into the dish with the fish.
The pack
- Typical UK size
- 120 g
- Weight packed
- 144 g
- Volume
- 150 ml
Computed from net weight and standard pack geometry, not weighed. Manufacturers publish net weight and nobody publishes packed weight or displaced volume, so this is an estimate and is labelled as one.
Per 100 g
Deliberately narrow. These are the five things a long-life diet
actually gets wrong, plus energy and protein. It is not a general
nutrition model and is not meant to be.
- Energy
- 175 kcal
- Protein
- 18.5 g
- Fibre
- 0 g
- Vitamin C
- 0 mg
- Vitamin A
- 56 µg
- Omega-3
- 2.98 g
- Sodium
- 315 mg
Source: CoFID 2021: 16-422 Sardines, canned in tomato sauce, whole contents
2 recipes using tinned sardines (in tomato sauce)