126 American Fisheries Society. 



When fish are packed raw, brining and drying alone 

 must remove the necessary water, therefore, these steps 

 must be well carried out. Brining removes some water and 

 to make the most of this step the fish should be kept in sat- 

 urated brine as long as possible without making the final 

 pack too salty. The fish are then well dried and packed in- 

 to the cans raw, with thick tomato sauce. Any water which 

 cooks out of the fish is taken up by the thick sauce. A dis- 

 advantage encountered here is that the canning process must 

 be completed within a few hours after the preliminary prep- 

 aration, which is a disadvantage compared with pre- 

 cooked fish which may be held as long as 48 hours before 

 being packed. 



Time is not available here for a full discussion of the 

 advantages and disadvantages of the different methods of 

 preparation just described. These, as well as other angles 

 of the problem and an elaboration of the parts of this paper, 

 including the experimental data are now to be taken up in a 

 Bureau of Fisheries bulletin which is now being prepared. 



The third problem selected for study was the partial 

 drying of such fish as sardines for canning. So far, the re- 

 moval of some water from raw or steamed fish by subject- 

 ing them to the action of moving, warm air, has been an 

 essential step in all successful methods of preparing fish 

 for canning as sardines. Commercially the fish are scat- 

 tered upon wire trays or belts contained in a tunnel through 

 which air is blown or drawn, the air being heated by first 

 passing over steamcoils. The principles involved in this 

 method of removing moisture and their best application are 

 in general unknown to the sardine canner. Then, too, the 

 behavior of raw and cooked fish under various drying con- 

 ditions has not yet been worked out. Accurate knowledge 

 of this latter point is necessary, to permit the practical appli- 

 cation of the fundamental principles of air drying to the 

 designing of apparatus and to the improving and cheapen- 

 ing of this important step in the preparation of the fish 

 for canning. 



This problem was approached by first studying air drying 

 in general, followed by the construction of an experimental 

 dryer which was used in investigating the behavior of raw 

 and steamed fish under the different drying conditions. 

 Data were also obtained upon commercial sardine dryers 

 and their operation. 



Before going into the results of the experiments it will 

 probably be well to discuss briefly the part drying plays in 

 the preparation of the fish for canning and the nature of air 

 drying. 



