Learning to Love Anchovies on Sandwiches
If you have ever ordered a Caesar salad and said "no anchovies, please" — if you have ever picked tiny fish off a pizza with the grimace of someone defusing a bomb — this piece is for you. You have been wronged by a bad experience, by the wrong preparation, by anchovies that were too many, too old, or too assertively placed. The anchovy is not the problem. The anchovy has been the victim.
The Fear and Where It Comes From
Anchovy aversion is almost always a texture-and-smell problem, not a flavor problem. People who claim to hate anchovies have usually encountered one of three bad versions: mushy, oxidized fillets straight from a bad tin; a single overwhelming anchovy draped across an otherwise normal salad; or the fermented fish sauce-forward school of anchovy preparation where the fishiness is the entire point.
None of these are how you should be using anchovies.
The correct use of an anchovy is as an amplifier. Salt-cured anchovies dissolved in olive oil contribute something that professional cooks call glutamate — the same compound found in Parmesan, soy sauce, Worcestershire, and aged meats — that makes other flavors taste more like themselves. You don't taste the anchovy. You taste everything else more intensely.
What Anchovies Actually Taste Like When Used Correctly
Used correctly, anchovies taste like: depth. Meatiness. The bottom of a great French onion soup. The savory crust of a well-seared steak. They taste like salt, but salt that has been transformed by time and fermentation into something complex and round.
The fishiness that people fear is mostly oxidation. Old anchovies in a tin that has been sitting in a pantry too long go from complex and savory to aggressively fishy. Fresh salt-packed anchovies from a good Italian importer, or high-quality oil-packed fillets from Spain or Italy, taste nothing like the gas station pizza anchovy of childhood trauma.
The Pan Bagnat: The Definitive Anchovy Sandwich
The pan bagnat — Provençal for "bathed bread" — is the clearest demonstration of what anchovies can do for a sandwich. It is, at its core, a pressed tuna Niçoise salad in a crusty round bread roll. The components: good tuna (ideally oil-packed), hard-boiled eggs, ripe tomatoes, black olives, thin-sliced green peppers, red onion, and anchovies. The whole thing is dressed with olive oil, red wine vinegar, and pressed under weight for an hour or more, allowing the oil to soak into the bread.
The anchovies do three things. They add salt without making the sandwich salty. They add a savory depth that makes the tuna taste more like tuna. And they add a fat dimension — their own oil — that helps the whole sandwich cohere. A pan bagnat without anchovies is a perfectly fine tuna sandwich. With anchovies, it becomes something that rewards serious attention.
If you are skeptical of anchovies, the pan bagnat is where to start. The pressing, the vinegar, the competing flavors — they tame the anchovy's assertiveness while keeping its contribution.
Caesar Salad as the Anchovy Gateway
Most people who say they hate anchovies have eaten thousands of Caesar salads in their lives. This is a useful fact. A proper Caesar dressing is built on anchovies — typically two or three fillets per serving, mashed to a paste with the garlic, then emulsified with egg yolk, lemon, and oil. The result is a dressing that tastes creamy, garlicky, and savory, with no identifiable fishiness.
The Caesar salad has been introducing anchovy skeptics to anchovies for nearly a century without their knowledge. This is the path. Start there.
Anchovy Butter on Roast Beef: The Move
Compound butters are one of the great underused techniques in sandwich construction. Anchovy butter — a mixture of good butter, salt-packed anchovies rinsed and mashed, a squeeze of lemon, and optionally a little dijon — applied to the cut surface of bread for a roast beef sandwich changes everything.
The butter melts slightly into the beef, basting it from below. The anchovies hit the fat of the beef and dissolve into something that tastes like the Platonic ideal of roast beef — more deeply savory than the beef alone. Add arugula and thin-sliced red onion and you have a sandwich worth talking about.
The anchovy butter route works for any beef preparation. It is extraordinary on a steak sandwich. It improves a simple hamburger. It makes a BLT significantly more interesting.
Oil-Packed vs. Salt-Packed: The Practical Difference
Oil-packed anchovies come in tins or jars, preserved in olive or vegetable oil, and are ready to use. They are more convenient and more commonly available. Quality varies enormously — the Spanish brands (Ortiz is the benchmark) are significantly better than generic grocery store tins.
Salt-packed anchovies come whole, covered in coarse salt, in tins that look like something from the 1940s. They require preparation: rinse off the salt, split the fish, remove the central bone, then soak in cold water for 20 minutes to reduce the salt content. The result is a firmer, more complex fillet with better texture. For applications where the anchovy itself will be visible — a pan bagnat, a more composed dish — salt-packed are worth the work.
For applications where the anchovy is melting into butter or dressing, oil-packed are fine. Use what you have.
A Four-Step Guide to Introducing Anchovies to Anchovy Skeptics
Step one: Don't announce it. A Caesar dressing made properly with anchovies, served to an anchovy skeptic who doesn't know, will be met with compliments. This is the proof of concept.
Step two: Show the tin. After the compliment, explain what's in it. Reframe the conversation: "You like anchovies — you just didn't know you liked good anchovies."
Step three: Move to compound applications. Anchovy butter, anchovy in a tomato sauce, Worcestershire (which is anchovy-based) in a steak marinade. Let the anchovy do its invisible work.
Step four: The pan bagnat. By now they trust you. Make it pressed, make it cold, serve it with good wine. This is the conversion moment.
The anchovy is one of the great pantry ingredients for anyone who eats sandwiches seriously. It costs almost nothing, lasts indefinitely when properly stored, and contributes more flavor per gram than nearly any other ingredient in your kitchen. The fear is not warranted.