Chargrilled Sardine

Chargrilled Sardine.

The *sardinha assada* — the Portuguese chargrilled sardine — is the canonical summer street food of the Algarve coast and the festival fish of the Iberian Atlantic. The technique is older than the Romans' arrival on the peninsula: a freshly caught sardine, salted lightly, grilled over open wood coals until the skin chars and the flesh sets. In the coastal villages of Albufeira, Olhão, and Lagos, the chargrilled sardine has been the cheapest possible meal and the most considered seasonal celebration for at least two thousand years.

Releone's Chargrilled Sardine renders this tradition in glass. The fish is the same Algarve sardine that the Millésimée SKU uses, but caught and chargrilled the same day at the dockside processor — over actual wood, actual coals, by a Portuguese chargrill team contracted to the Releone supply chain. The fish is then deboned, skin-on, and packed in select Andalusian extra-virgin olive oil. No other ingredients.

The Chargrilled Sardine is the catalogue's accessible entry — the SKU designed to be the first Releone jar a customer ever opens. It is also, in the founder's reading, the best argument the catalogue makes that preserved seafood does not have to be expensive to be considered. At eighteen dollars, the Chargrilled Sardine is the price of a casual lunch for one. What is in the jar is a thousand years of Portuguese coastal tradition, signed forever on a chain.