As the chef of the Cenador de Amós taught us, after opening the can of salted anchovies, we remove the excess salt from the anchovies under the water tap and stack them up to then proceed to clean and knead them. The process known as knead anchovies will allow us get some clean anchovy fillets, full of flavor and no bones, skins, or other awkward parts to eat.
Cleaning the anchovies
The next step will be to put the anchovies in a bowl with water in which we will leave them for a couple of minutes, which will leave them at their ideal point of salt. Next, to remove the skins and scales, we take a lace and go lightly scraping, from tail to headfirst on one side and then on the other, continuing until you see the clean meat.
With all the cuts that we are going to get in the process, chef Jesús Sánchez told us that we can make anchovy butterdelicious, simply by giving a slight boil to a quality butter in which we put all the waste, and then filter the butter and cool it again so that it recovers its usual texture, but with all the flavor and essence of anchovies.
Once clean, put the anchovies in another bowl with water and let them rest for another couple of minutes. After that soak, we proceed to trim the edge of the anchovies with scissors and remove the bone.
To separate the two loins, we open at the top, not at the belly and as we have them separated, we remove the central spine. The resulting fillets or loins, submerged in a third bowl with water and then we pass them to a cloth, where we will dry them by squeezing a little. Now comes the final part in which we will leave the perfect and unpolluted anchovies, ready for tasting.
For this part, we take the lace again and we remove the small lateral thorns that they have in the upper part and any rest of skin or interior that is not the clean meat of the anchovy. Next, we do the finer work stroking or rubbing with handssliding them from the head to the tail, to leave the fillets at their point, ready to eat at that moment, or to leave them preserved for a few days submerged in sunflower oil.
At the time of the tasting, their thing is to remove the anchovies from the sunflower oil, and drain them by arranging them on a plate, where we will serve the fillets covered with a good extra virgin olive oil or accompanied by butter, according to taste.