Don Bocarte - Why These Are the World's Finest Anchovies

The sign above the factory says it all: Arte en el Paladar. Art for the Palate. It's a bold claim for a building on an industrial estate on the outskirts of Santoña, a small fishing town on the Cantabrian coast of northern Spain. But standing in front of it - which I did on a sourcing trip a few years ago - it doesn't feel like marketing. It feels like a statement of intent from people who mean every word of it.

Don Bocarte is, in the quiet estimation of chefs, food writers, and the kind of people who take tinned fish very seriously, the benchmark for Cantabrian anchovies. Not the most famous - Ortiz has that distinction - but consistently regarded as the finest. The difference, once you've tasted them side by side, is not subtle.

Why Santoña?

Santoña is a small coastal town in Cantabria, 48 kilometres east of Santander, almost entirely surrounded by water. It exists, in large part, because of anchovies. The town's relationship with the fish - locally called 'bocarte' when fresh - stretches back centuries, but the canning industry as we know it was actually introduced by Italian immigrants in the late 19th century. A Sicilian businessman named Giovanni Vella Scaliota settled in Santoña in 1883 and invented the method of preparing anchovy fillets in oil, ready to eat. Local families adopted his methods, and an industry was born.

What makes Santoña's anchovies special isn't just tradition - it's geography. The Bay of Biscay, with its cold, nutrient-rich Atlantic water, produces anchovies with a higher fat content than those found in the Mediterranean. More fat means more flavour, better texture, and a superior end result after curing. The fishing season is deliberately narrow: April, May, and June only, when the bocarte swim close to shore to spawn and are at their fattest and best. Outside those three months, Don Bocarte simply doesn't fish.

How Don Bocarte Anchovies Are Made

The production process is unhurried almost to the point of defiance.

After the spring catch, the anchovies are gutted, headed, and packed into barrels in alternating layers with sea salt. Weights are placed on top to gradually press and dehydrate the fish. Then they wait - for a minimum of eight months, sometimes considerably longer for premium selections. During this time, the anchovies undergo a slow enzymatic transformation: proteins break down, the flesh deepens in colour from silver to a warm amber-brown, and flavour compounds concentrate in a way that simply cannot be rushed.

Once the curing is complete, each fillet is cleaned by hand. This is not a figure of speech - it is done one anchovy at a time, by skilled workers who remove the skin, bones, and spine with their fingers, leaving two clean fillets per fish. The women who do this work in Santoña are known as 'sobadoras' - their expertise, developed over years, is the reason Don Bocarte anchovies look the way they do: uniform, intact, without tears or dark spots along the spine that signal rushed or careless handling.

The fillets are then packed into tins and covered in extra virgin olive oil - not vegetable oil, not brine, but proper extra virgin olive oil that continues to flavour and preserve the fish. Don Bocarte uses Masia el Altet olive oil, a single-estate Spanish EVOO with a clean, fruity character that complements rather than dominates the anchovy itself.

The result must be kept refrigerated. This, counterintuitively, is a mark of quality - it means the anchovies are preserved in oil rather than salt alone, which makes them more delicate and perishable, but also incomparably more flavourful.

What They Taste Like

This is where the supermarket anchovy comparison breaks down entirely.

The anchovies most people have encountered - the flat, intensely salty strips used to season a pizza or a Caesar dressing - are a completely different product. They're useful, but they're flavouring agents rather than something you'd eat on their own.

Don Bocarte anchovies are something you eat on their own.

The texture is firm but yielding, almost buttery. The colour is a deep, warm amber - that salmon-brown tone is a reliable indicator of proper curing time. The flavour is rich, complex, and balanced in a way that's hard to describe without resorting to the word umami: deeply savoury, intensely of the sea, but with none of the aggressive saltiness that makes cheap anchovies so one-dimensional. They're characterised by their meatiness, low salt point, and excellent cleanliness.

The olive oil they come packed in is not to be discarded. It has taken on the flavour of the anchovies during storage and is extraordinary used as a dressing drizzled over the open tin, spooned over bread, or used as the base of a vinaigrette.

The Two Don Bocarte Anchovies We Stock

Don Bocarte Cantabrian Anchovies in Extra Virgin Olive Oil is the standard tin - and standard here means exceptional. Ten to twelve hand-cleaned fillets, cured for a minimum of eight months, packed in Masia el Altet EVOO. These are what you open when you want to understand what anchovies can actually be.

Shop Don Bocarte Cantabrian Anchovies →

Don Bocarte Anchovies in Organic Extra Virgin Olive Oil follow the same meticulous process with certified organic certification across the entire supply chain - from the fishing methods to the olive oil used in packing. The flavour profile is almost identical; the organic version is there for those who want complete transparency on provenance at every stage.

Shop Don Bocarte Anchovies in Organic Extra Virgin Olive Oil →

How to Eat Them - And What Not to Do With Them

The first time you open a tin of Don Bocarte anchovies, the instinct might be to reach for a recipe. Resist it.

The best way to eat them, at least initially, is directly from the tin with nothing more than a piece of good bread and a drizzle of the oil from the tin itself. This is how they're eaten in Cantabria, and it's how you'll come to understand what makes them worth the price.

After that, here's where they belong:

1. On toast with butter - unsalted butter thickly cut like a slice of cheddar cheese, good sourdough, two or three fillets laid across the top. The combination of cold butter and the room temperature, savoury anchovy is one of the great simple pleasures of a well-stocked kitchen.

2. As a tapa, straight from the tin - a few fillets on a small plate with guindilla peppers alongside and a glass of txakoli or Manzanilla sherry. This is the Basque pintxo tradition at its most elemental, and it needs nothing else.

3. In a simple anchovy and roasted pepper salad - I was served this in a restaurant in Bilbao on that same trip, it's a very simple recipe that's featured in our recipe section - you just need some delicious sweet roasted red peppers and pair them with Don Bocarte anchovies, drizzled generously with a good extra virgin olive oil spiked with freshly grated garlic and a pinch of fresh parsley. Serve this as a sharing starter with guests or just eat the lot yourself.

4. Paired with a guindilla pepper and a manzanilla olive - skewer these together to make the OG of pintxos, the famous Basque pintxo is named after Rita Hayworth's 1946 film character - "salada, picante y un poco verde" (salty, spicy and a bit green).

Why We Stock Them

When I stood outside that factory in Santoña, I wasn't there because I found Don Bocarte on a trade catalogue. I was there because I'd tasted the anchovies and needed to understand how they were made. That trip - seeing the barrels of salting fish, the women cleaning each fillet by hand, the care that goes into something that ends up in a small tin - confirmed everything I suspected.

These are the anchovies we stock at Somerset Foodie because they are, straightforwardly, the best we've found. We stock two variants - one packed in regular extra virgin olive oil and one packed in organic extra virgin olive oil.

But start with the tin. Just the tin, some bread, and the oil they come in.

Shop the full Don Bocarte range at Somerset Foodie →

Building a Spanish larder around your anchovies? Explore our full Spanish collection - Gordal olives, guindilla peppers, O-Med olive oil, and more, sourced from producers across Spain.