by Gordon Hamilton

Created on: January 18, 2010

How to prepare spicy tuna salad is always best achieved by using fresh fillet of tuna loin. Canned tuna is a very different prospect and the fact that the tuna is over-cooked during the canning process and rendered bland and uninteresting by comparison is inescapable. Canned tuna - for this reason - is also devoid of a lot of the natural nutrients found in fresh tuna.

Tuna loin is best cooked on a griddle or outdoor grill over a very high heat. If cooking tuna in this fashion, one should oil the tuna fillet on both sides - never the griddle or grill - with an oil which is suitable for cooking at such high temperatures, such as sunflower or corn oil. If one is using a frying-pan, a similar type of oil should be added to the pan and brought up to a fairly high heat before the tuna is added.

A tuna loin steak of about half to three-quarters of an inch in thickness is ideal for this purpose. One should watch the tuna loin from the side and turn it when it appears to have cooked one-third of the way through. When it appears to have cooked to a similar extent on the other side, it should be removed from the heat and set aside to cool and rest while one prepares the remainder of the spicy tuna salad ingredients.

There are a great many different ingredients which one can use to prepare a spicy tuna salad aside from the only essential which is tuna. For one medium sized, quarter to half-pound tuna steak, however, the following will prepare a delicious spicy tuna salad: four lettuce leaves, washed and shredded; the uncooked corn kernels carefully removed from a cob with a cleaver; one small red chilli pepper, de-seeded and very finely chopped; one large tomato, de-seeded and chopped; one clove of garlic, crushed; one tbsp extra virgin olive oil and quarter tsp of white wine vinegar. Salt and freshly ground black pepper should also be added to taste.

The tuna should be thinly sliced to be added to the salad and the only requirement in which the ingredients should be mixed together is that the olive oil and white wine vinegar should be added only immediately prior to serving the salad and stirred through at that stage. This is to prevent them penetrating in to any of the solid ingredients and making the salad limp or in any other way distasteful.

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