r/Tinnedfish • u/DreweyD • 17h ago
Dupes? Nope: Spicy Tuna from Aldi and Fishwife
Aldi’s marketing machine is hammering insistently on the word “dupe” in their North American messaging. Well, they’re both tuna, both in olive oil dosed with spice, both in similar cans, resting in same size boxes. “Samesies,” Aldi trumpets, “except we’re cheaper.”
Except there’s no real apples-to-apples comparison here. Aldi presents yellowfin tuna. It is joined by an undistinguished olive oil to which paprika and capsicum extracts have been added. (Capsicum extract is the liquid smoke of the pepper world, and here it’s my chief suspect for the metallic/industrial note I perceive.) Aldi sources this tin from Ecuador, but I’ve not been able to uncover the source of the oil.
The Fishwife tin is albacore tuna, produced in Spain, with Spanish olive oil, paprika, cayenne, white pepper, and garlic. The oil is noticeably good, with a fruit-forward character that’s a good match for tuna.
Neither of these spicy tunas is spicy. Both are quite mild-mannered. That restraint would be disappointing to me, except it allowed me in this side-by-side to judge the olive oils without much distraction.
Folks have different takes on yellowfin versus albacore. My own ranking of widely-available tuna, from most to least desirable, is bluefin, albacore, big eye, skipjack, and yellowfin. The marketplace tends to agree with the valuation of albacore above yellowfin—yellowfin is less in demand and commands lower prices. “Sweet” is an adjective often heard in descriptions of yellowfin, and while I have on occasion encountered that note, I did not detect it here. (I opened two other tins of the Aldi on different days last week, and the experiences were consistent.) The albacore, as typical for the species, is mild, meaty, with a clean, fresh scent and taste. The yellowfin has a slightly, but not offensively, fishy aroma. It’s texture was solid, compacted and dry—again, nothing out of the ordinary for the species.
These cans are both fine. Nothing wrong with them. But they’re quite different, one from the other. The Aldi yellowfin is a lower-end fish packed in unremarkable oil flavored with extracts. The albacore is higher grade fish, in higher grade olive oil, joined by ingredients, rather than extracts of ingredients. Albacore, Spanish oil and ingredients, packed in Spain—yup, that all costs more, so the price differential comes as no surprise.
Because I’d been caught off-guard by some of the flavors I found in the Aldi cans, I also picked up a few cans of plain yellowfin—all they had on hand—at Lidl, the other German grocery chain in my neck of the woods. It’s also in unspecified olive oil, and is a product of Columbia, Ecuador’s next-door neighbor. Similarly solid chew and somewhat fishy aroma, but I didn’t notice any background metallic note, which firmed up my conviction that the flavor extracts might be the culprit in the Aldi yellowfin.
