All of my local supermarkets in the US have a million cans of sardines from a dozen different brands each, ranging from like $1.50/can for e.g. Goya in soybean oil[0] to like $7/can for very fancy ones, with the average around $4.50/can for ones in olive oil. They're not gone, just more expensive than last year for nice ones.
[0] - sardines come packed in your choice of water, soybean oil, olive oil, extra virgin olive oil, tomato sauce, or louisiana-style hot sauce with additional selection choices of containing herbs or hot peppers or olives, and olive oil ones always cost more than water or soybean oil ones for obvious reasons
What I want is non-premium-brand, not-Chinese sardines -- in mustard sauce. These brands can vary: Chicken of the Sea, Beach Cliff, and whatever the house brands of stores like Wal-Mart and Aldi are come to mind immediately. I adore these as a relatively inexpensive, healthy, and tasty shelf-stable snack -- not as luxury items. I will pay what I must, but I do not wish to spend very much money on them.
What I find instead are sardines in water, oil, and only rarely in tepid hot sauce. The more expensive or plainly-flavored they are, the more likely they are to be present.
The spots for all of the inexpensive sardines on the shelves are lacking, and the spots for every brand of mustard sardines are resolutely empty at every store I visit. The Kroger near my house has dozens of cans of reasonably-inexpensive sardines, but they're all in oil. The rest is picked clean like a covid-era toilet paper aisle.
It has been this way for months. It is not a hallucination, and I am not holding it wrong. I've been an avid consumer of mustard sardines for many decades. I am not vision-impaired. :)
Things are such that I take time to visit far-flung grocery stores when I travel regionally for work and also troll on Instacart looking for hits that will help me in the search of mustard sardines. It's been a nearly-complete non-starter; I've found only a couple of tins in the past few months.
[*]: As an unreferenced footnote, I'd like to preemptively note that I'm very particularly disinterested in hearing suggestions for other varieties of foods to eat instead. I am not in need of assistance, and this report of my own observations is not a request for help. There is nothing that can be added here that will change my proclivities on this matter, and there are no words that can magically restore mustard sardines to store shelves near me. I'd like to thank everyone in advance for understanding that neither my tastes for foods nor my regional market for sardines are things that can be controlled or adjusted by a comment on HN.
I've been eating sardines for years. My grandfather used to eat them and I somehow acquired a taste for them.
Instead of looking for sardines with sauces, just buy them in water and put your own sauce on them.
A good brown mustard or just plain ol Tabasco are great on them. I even use quality olive oil sometimes. They actually taste way better doing it this way.
You're the third person to suggest this post-canning mustard treatment. But you are polite and cordial about it instead of outwardly dismissive, and this is appreciated.
I'm no stranger to mustards. I've got a few varieties on-hand at any time. My favorite American yellow mustard is in rotation at all times, along with at least one bottle of backup mustard in the pantry. There's also always a tickly sort of Dijon in the fridge and I keep a random-brand discount store jar of coarse-ground imported mustard (usually from Poland) available.
I'm out of the extra hot version of Löwensenf, from Germany, at the moment. I need to fix this, but it's hard to find at a reasonable price. I'll find more of it soon enough.
When my favorite mustard once became impossible to buy in sane quantities, I found myself ordering an insane quantity: A box of six one-gallon jugs was easy to order from a local food service supplier and it was surprisingly quick and inexpensive to get it done. (Yes, six entire gallons -- nearly 30 liters -- of mustard, all at once. I bought extra pumps and made a couple of kits to give away to some people I know; the rest was for me.)
Anyway, sardines: I don't know if my grandparents ate sardines or not, but I doubt it. Out of countless meals and snacks, I don't really recall ever eating fish with them at all.
I cut my teeth on sardines at the kitchen table with my dad: He always kept a few tins of Brunswick-branded sardines (always in mustard sauce) in the cabinet. One day, when I was very small, he talked me into trying some, which started with a lesson in winding open a can with a key. After getting them open and overcoming a moment or two of confusion about the strong scents and flavors along with the texture (edible bones? wtf?), I found that I liked them quite a lot. We then frequently shared a tin of sardines together, just picking out little bits of fish with our own forks, which was lovely until things changed as I became a ravenous and disdainful teenager.
And of course I've tried putting mustard on more-plain varieties of sardines. I've tried it over and over again.
Mostly, I've previously experimented with this technique with sardines from Aldi: There, 3 or 4 varieties share the same SKU and arrive packed together in equal quantities, all in one box. This leads to the most-popular kinds disappearing from shelves while the less-popular kinds can become a sort of permanently-annoying surplus. My observations while digging through stock at Aldi suggests that mustard sardines are the most popular in my neck of the woods, because those are the ones that are always hardest to buy here.
So, thus: They historically have always had a ton of sardines in water and/or oil. And they were always priced right, because Aldi. And I always have (what I consider to be) good mustard available. It was obvious to try putting the two things together.
It makes me happy to hear that you think it's better this way, and I do wish that my own tastes were so easily placated.
For my part, I think it's far better when the mustard sauce and the sardines have both spent a lot of quality time together while sealed up together inside of the same can. I find that the flavors meld together beautifully, with the flesh of the fish becoming deeply mustard-flavored while the mustard goo becoming strongly sardine-flavored and a bit gelatinous. I enjoy this quite a lot as I scrape the last gloppy bits of canned mustard and fish out of the tin with a fork.
I find that this experience can't be sufficiently replicated by buying the two things separately and then combining them at serving. The packaged whole is greater than the post-purchase sum of its parts.
But, again: I'm pleased that it works for you and that it sounds like it might even be preferable.
It's always good to find ways to maximize one's enjoyment of sardines, and I think I'm doing pretty well on maximizing my own enjoyment.
The distribution SNAFU will either sort itself out, or it won't. :)
What is better about Morrocan vs Chinese packed sardines? Also when prices are so low you are eating European sprats (Sprattus sprattus) or herring (Clupea harengus), not true sardines.
Most of the sardines I get come from Poland. I very seldom see Morroco listed on the tins that I get. I do not understand how an unstated price can infer origin, or species, or the presence of only binary choice.
My preference is learned: Of the mustard sardines I've had from China, all of them have been fucked up somehow. They're fucking gross. They wind up binned. They do not deserve another cent of my money.
Your unwarranted questioning of my food preference has been noted.
(Please note that I have not placed any pressure upon you to defend your own preferences.)
A couple days ago I received a case of filters (automotive oil filters basically) for a piece of manufacturing equipment. As I read the words "made in China" on the box one of those Pakistani manufacturing videos where they happened to be making automotive oil filters played through my mind and I thought to myself that perhaps made in China is fine.
Sounds like your true concern is a mustard shortage rather than a sardine shortage.
You can find mustards in the "Condiments" section of your local market.
If that is a problem then perhaps you are living in the wrong place. Move to Texas where you will find canned mustard sardines aplenty on store shelves.
If moving to Texas would make me be just as smart, witty, and observant as you think that you are yourself, then: I think that I would rather stay where I'm at, thanks.
Other than their profoundly myopic nature, the notions you present are somewhat compelling.
ssl-3 says "If moving to Texas would make me be just as smart, witty, and observant as you think that you are yourself, then: I think that I would rather stay where I'm at, thanks."
Then we shall both remain happy and Texans a bit smarter, wittier and more observant on average.
And yummm, these mustard sardines are truly as tasty as you say - hadn't had any in awhile - thanks for reminding me!8-))
Little secret: we only disconnect lefties! Most of them don't know about that box on the side of their rental unit! And FWIW we're hoarding the mustard sardines for WWIII (or the next Super Bowl party). Bwahahahaaaaah!
This is bizarre to me. Do you always shop this way? Personally I find a favourite brand and stick with it. There isn't a single product I can think of where I'll buy the same thing from multiple brands.
> "Personally I find a favourite brand and stick with it."
Two responses:
1) And by what process exactly do you find a favorite? Clairvoyance?
2) If you can have a favorite, then the different brands must have different qualities. And if different brands have different qualities, then they will be differently good for different uses.
> "There isn't a single product I can think of where I'll buy the same thing from multiple brands."
They aren't the same thing. They're differently-prepared multi-ingredient products. They're often not even the same species of fish, because "sardine" is a general category not a species.
So once you've decided on a particular brand and variety of chips you only ever buy that single brand and variety of chips, never branching out to try different things? Never get an urge for wavy chips instead of traditional, or maybe tortilla chips the next time, maybe even every now and then cheese curls?
I don't even like Sardines but I definitely understand there's a ton of variety in flavors and packing styles and even the species of fish can be a little different.
Some people would happily eat the same thing for breakfast, dinner, and supper every single day for the rest of their lives. I don't necessarily understand it, but I've met plenty of people like that.
Shelf-stable foodstuffs like canned sardines can be ordered for delivery from the regular Amazon, the same side of their site you might order a book or a laptop from, outside of their newer grocery retail channels.
I went to my local grocery store (small West Texas town)last week and bought the last 6 remaining cans.
I've never once seen the sardine shelf empty until last week.
Here in the US, on the regular retail side of Amazon, I see a twelve pack of 3.75oz canned sardines in water, Beach Cliff brand, for $18.96, or $0.42/oz. I don't buy sardines but this seems not terribly out of line with prices I see at Walmart and Target, maybe a 20-25% premium. A local fancy grocery store has sardines in water from Chicken of the Sea at $0.58/oz.
Could be regional, or something specific to TJs. My local Fred Meyer in Oregon has plenty of availability right now. Though the prices are a little bit inflated.
Plenty in Ireland as well. The craze certainly seems to be more subdued here, though some of the posh delis in Dublin, in particular, seem to be riding the wave. ( https://www.reddit.com/r/CannedSardines/comments/1o9dhlg/any... , for any Dublin tin-hunters.)
All of my local supermarkets in the US have a million cans of sardines from a dozen different brands each, ranging from like $1.50/can for e.g. Goya in soybean oil[0] to like $7/can for very fancy ones, with the average around $4.50/can for ones in olive oil. They're not gone, just more expensive than last year for nice ones.
[0] - sardines come packed in your choice of water, soybean oil, olive oil, extra virgin olive oil, tomato sauce, or louisiana-style hot sauce with additional selection choices of containing herbs or hot peppers or olives, and olive oil ones always cost more than water or soybean oil ones for obvious reasons