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Help me like Tuna
bigpanda
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Ok, so I'm in the process of eating healthier and have heard people praise chunk light tuna. i picked up a couple cans but remembered. I hate tuna.
What can I mix in with it to not make it taste so much like... Well, tuna.
I'd prefer to avoid things with a lot of fat (i.e. mayo) as I'm trying to lose weight and in general be healthier.
And do you guys mix it up with some salad or something else or just eat this stuff straight from the can?
What can I mix in with it to not make it taste so much like... Well, tuna.
I'd prefer to avoid things with a lot of fat (i.e. mayo) as I'm trying to lose weight and in general be healthier.
And do you guys mix it up with some salad or something else or just eat this stuff straight from the can?
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I don't eat them. Ever.
Drain a can of flake light tuna (in water!) and toss that in. Stir it around. Add a small (maaaaybe 1/4 cup?) amount of blue cheese. Dice it up first so it distributes evenly. Bake this concoction at 350 F for like a half hour.
Fucking delicious and pretty reasonable on the fat.
I also like to make my tuna salad by using dijon mustard and a small splash of soy sauce instead of mayo, with some finely diced green onions but I'm weird.
CUZ THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE AND IT'S GIVING ME A RASH
I like to add diced fresh jalepenos, diced onion, and a little black pepper.
This post is more or less completely absurd and unnecessarily alarmist and continued posts along this theme will not be considered okay.
CUZ THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE AND IT'S GIVING ME A RASH
It should be said though that tuna has a very strong taste whatever you put it in, and if you don't like that taste, you're probably not going to like stuff made with tuna. You can make yourself keep eating it and see if you can acquire a taste for it, but it's okay at some point to say "this is not for me".
- two cans tuna
- two eggs
- 1/2 - 3/4 of a pack of saltines
- spices of your choice; I use a lot of black pepper, a little red, and some oregano or basil, but you can experiment with whatever you have on hand
- a little lemon juice
Crumble the saltines up as fine as you can, drain the tuna, and then mix everything together in a big bowl. It'll probably take five minutes or so with your hands; you want the mixture to be able to hold together when you form it into three or four patties, so you may need to add more or less saltines. Get a skillet, coat in olive oil, flip every few minutes on lowest heat to minimize it sticking to the pan. You want it to be brown and cooked through. I eat them with dijon mustard, a little ketchup, and a light salad on the side.
edit - Hmm, looking closer, this looks like it's close to what Nataneko mentioned above.
Alternatively, for a very low-frills low-budget sandwich, slice a plain bagel in half, open a can of tuna, drain it, put the tuna on top of the bagel, one or two slices of the cheese of your choice on top of that, microwave for ~45 seconds, you have yourself a tuna melt. Note that the little chunks of tuna have a tendency to pop and explode so this may result in regular microwave cleanings.
One easy thing I like to do is make a pot of macaroni and cheese and throw in a drained can of tuna. Instant tuna casserole.
Canned, chunk light tuna is made from farm-raised tuna, harvested at a young age, so they aren't endangered, and there is minimal mercury.
That being said, a bit of light mayo isn't going to kill you, panda; moderation is the key. You could also substitute a hard-boiled egg. I throw in some diced pickles or relish, along with some onions.
Do make sure you're getting enough fat in your diet (around 30% of your calories should be from fat, the vast majority of which should be unsaturated).
I'm slowly trying to get back into Salmon. Without having to expound too much, I got really bad food poisoning from it one time and was literally vomiting from my eye sockets it was so bad.
I've had some once or twice in the last year or so, but it usually still makes me kind of queasy once I start to smell it.
Then I make a bowl of brown rice, and mix it in to the salad. It's delicious, brown rice is healthy for you, and it's damn filling. Also, you can make tons of rice and tuna and stick it in the fridge for next meals.
I will say that I generally am not a huge canned tuna fan, but tuna steak is pretty awesome and tastes pretty different from what comes out of a can. It's a lot more expensive though.
I tend to try and avoid cooking fish in the apartment because it's kind of small and I don't want everything smelling like fish for weeks.
I went over to a friends house for the holidays and they had just fried up some catfish. It smelled fucking delish, but my coat and sweatshirt smelled like it for days. Had to wash the sweatshirt and air the coat out for about a day.
If you bake it as opposed to frying is the smell as bad?
If it's in water, here's what I make- it's super cheap, takes almost no time, is warm and filling comfort food. The only drawback is that it looks like dogbarf. But the golden mushroom soup is such a strong flavor that the tuna is just another protein- might as well be chicken, I think. Tastes good to me!
I just realized it's pretty similar to Pheezer's recipe, but there you go.
1 can tuna
1 can golden mushroom soup
optional canned or frozen corn
one pot cooked egg noodles
1 frying pan
Put soup and tuna in frying pan. Do not drain tuna, leave all the water in. Mix in corn. Heat on low until warm and bubbly. Pour over egg noodles. Eat.
That's it.
Mustard, spicy, normal whatever you like, its pretty non heinous assuming you are not eating a crap ton of it (ie 1 bottle per can of tuna).
Also for a more completish meal,
1-2 Whole grain wraps
1 Can of chunk light tuna drained
1 Red pepper
1-2 Tblspoons of hummus.
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A little mayo, a hard-boiled egg, relish, red onion and some black pepper with tuna on some some sourdough wheat bread is fucking delicious and nutritious.
Also, it's been said but make sure you drain the hell out of water in the tuna can. A big part of the real fishy taste comes from the water in there.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Try poaching or steaming fish for the least smelly version.
As for liking tuna steaks or sashimi but not canned tuna, the Japanese don't even call them the same thing. Canned Tuna is 'sea chicken' and most people would have to think for a moment to connect it to the bright red stuff used in sushi or tuna steaks.
I don't know about you yourself, bigpanda, but a lot of Americans don't seem to eat much fish or know all the different varieties. Have you tried oily fish (mackerel, herring), snapper, cod etc? Quite apart from the fresh fish, I like canned sardines in a toasted sandwich. Oily fish is also a great way to get good fats in your diet.
I like to put diced fresh cucumber in my salad, and the soy sauce does work wonders.
Whoever mentioned hummus, that sounds inhumanly delicious.
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Al dente. Italian, not French ('a la dente' means 'with cogs')
I'm not sure there's much merit in forcing yourself to like canned tuna, I'm also not sure there's much you can do to eradicate or mask it's taste. Perhaps liberal amounts of chilli and other strong tasting spices and flavourings would help but mostly you add canned Tuna under the acceptance that whatever you added it to will now taste of canned Tuna.
A simple pasta sauce might consist of frying some finely chopped white onion and chives in some olive oil then adding the Tuna, frying briefly then add a spoon of tomato puree and a tin of chopped tomato. Simmer for a few minutes then serve with al dente pasta. You could add chilli powder or a couple of red chillies when you add the tomato puree to make a hot sauce and perhaps mask some of the intensity of the Tuna. I guess it could optionally be served with rice instead of pasta as well.
Honestly though, I'd scout around for a healthy source of protein that you actually enjoy the flavour of to begin with. There are, as they say, plenty more fish in the sea.
I used to hate eating pretty much any kind of non-white fish, but eating tuna steak really got me into tuna.
Now i'll even eat it raw, altough i prefer it baked on the outside, while completely red on the inside.
i'll even stomach the canned variety, even if it only tastes like a distant cosin of actual tuna....
yes, it's more expensive than the canned one, but i think it's worth it from time to time.
I want to vouch for the guy who recommended tuna steaks. I frequently find that when I hate tuna the most is when people have made a half-hearted attempt at disguising the fact that it is, in fact, tuna. I either have to mix in a whole lot of stuff until tuna is only about 10% of the ingredients, or I just try and embrace the tuna-ness. Tuna steaks fall into the later category: season with sea salt and a generous quantity of lemon. The flesh is kind of flakey texture but just keep chewing.
I also want to vouch for the guy who recommended tomato sauce. Marinara sauce in the old world is originally not a tomato sauce--it's a seafood sauce. The word "marina" is right there in marinara. You can't go too far off trying to mix a little seafood in with a tomato sauce and some pasta.
Tuna is crazy filling though.
(This is essentially dorm food, but it works out to tasting pretty decent)
Healthy and delicious tuna sandwhich
Drain a can of tuna and empty the contents into a bowl.
Add a large dollop of light sour cream.
Stir that together with a medium squirt of yellow mustard.
Then add relish, about two heaping spoonfuls.
Finally add a pinch of black pepper and salt to taste.
1 tin of tuna
1 jar of tomato based pasta sauce (or if you have time make your own)
2 slices of bread, wholemeal is nice, made into breadcrumbs
50g grated cheese
Pre heat oven to gas mark 5, sorry dont know what that is on the electic type cooker!
Mix together cooked pasta, drained tuna and tomoato based pasta sauce.
Put this mixture into an oblong oven dish.
Mix together grated cheese and breadcrumbs, sprinkle evenly over the top of the tuna and pasta mix.
Cover with aluminium foil and cook in the oven for 30 minutes, uncover for the last 10minutes.
http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/pan-bagnat-recipe/index.html
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I gotta jump in, being a Marine Biologist and all.
First off, tuna is delicious and I will consume it canned, raw, or cooked any which way.
Tuna farming is currently not sustainable enough to be widespread. Tuna are fast swimming fish capable of covering vast distances over sustained periods of swimming. All that swimming is what makes their muscles red and good to eat. They're working on farming them, but we have not seen widespread success yet. The tuna that you buy in a can was caught on the open ocean, and immediately processed in a giant factory ship.
Whether or not that bothers you is subjective.
Atlantic Albacore stocks could be considered "at risk", but according to Wiki, the stock has not been assessed in over 10 years. (yikes).
Pacific Albacore stocks are doing just fine and dandy, and seem to be at all time highs. (My guess as to a cause would be a reduction in predators like sharks and dolphins, but that's got nothing to do with whether or not you should eat tuna).
Mercury is a valid concern. Tuna do accumulate mercury in their muscle tissue, and if you are an expectant mother, or a child, it would be a good idea to lay off the tuna. For healthy adults like you or me, there isn't much of a problem. The "gov't reccommendation" (oh goody) is no more than 3 cans a week.
Those are the facts, I'm not trying to be an alarmist, just trying to lay this info all out on the table. Tuna is a healthy and delicious food, as are most fish. I only wish we would strive harder to be more careful about the way we harvest them.
tldr: Marine Biologist says "eat tuna, but be aware of where it comes from".
My favorite tuna salad? A little Mayo, a little dill pickle relish, black pepper and celery salt. I also like it sashimi style, but I prefer the texture and flavor of salmon.
edit: You might want to try the tuna in a foil pouch. It's a little more expensive, but I really like it. The flavor is very nice, and it seems fresher than the can.
Furthermore, while the FDA recommendations for canned chunk light tuna for pregnant women and young children say to keep it down to two servings per week, they group the canned chunk-light tuna with four other "low-mercury" fish, then go on to recommend alternatively up to one serving of albacore tuna per week. The issue is that albacore tuna contains about ten times the amount of mercury found in canned chunk-light tuna. So, you've got one recommendation saying about a fifth of the amount of the other recommendation is safe. Keep in mind that this is for pregnant women and young children, the groups most sensitive to mercury.
So, if you can eat one serving of albacore per week, that's equivalent to about 1.3 cans of tuna per day. All tuna are not created equal.
I had a lengthy half-conversation/half-debate with a friend who is a post-doctoral student studying marine toxicology (most specifically, mercury levels in the San Francisco Bay) about this a couple years ago.
If you're going to be mixing it with red sauce though, you might want to go with fresh fish, and something white rather than tuna. That's how my mom used to make it. It's pretty healthy, and between the milder taste of white fish and the stronger taste of the red sauce it might be pretty good for people who aren't crazy about fish. Kind of like this: http://www.recipezaar.com/Haddock-Pizzaiola-92390 You wind up with a whole piece of fish rather than sauce, but you have some pasta or bread on the side for carbs. It's good with some onions in the sauce too.
Most kinds of (non-canned) fish are pretty good baked with some combination of butter/olive oil, lemon/lime, herbs, s+p, and possibly breadcrumbs or some chopped fruit and onion relish on top. It's healthier than frying, no/less smell in the house, and easier- the only thing you have to watch for is overcooking it.
And vomiting from your eye sockets, jesus fucking christ.