Tuna salad is one of the foods I like to have in the fridge on a regular basis. It goes well as the protein portion of a meal when we are too lazy, too tired, or too hungry to cook something. It also goes great on a sandwich or in a salad. And now, that school is back in session, we will be making it even more often as it is one of my son’s favorite sandwich options.
But eating always the same thing can get a little boring, so we try different spice and ingredient combinations to give the tuna salad a fresh twist. Here are a few of variations we like to make:
The common American tuna salad, as you may know, calls for canned white tuna in water, mayonnaise and celery. We don’t usually love white tuna in water because it’s very dry and not so flavorful. But thanks to the mayo added in here, it actually tastes really good. Just don’t go overboard with the mayo, because then you’ll only taste the mayo and nothing else. Try to be generous with the celery, though. It lightens up the salad and freshens it.
Another tuna salad I like to make uses canned dark tuna in olive oil (also known as Italian tuna), thinly chopped onion, chopped parsley, fresh lemon juice, very little mayo (enough to ‘glue’ the ingredients together), salt and black pepper. Very simple, very easy, and very refreshing! Tuna goes very well with lemon!!
One of my son’s favorite variations is what he calls the Israeli tuna salad, which consists of canned dark tuna in olive oil, chopped onion, sweet corn kernels from a can, chopped Israeli pickles (dill pickles will do, if you can’t find the Israeli ones), and a little mayonnaise.
As school has just started a couple of weeks ago, I needed to make sure there was food to take, so I opened three tuna cans and started making the Israeli tuna salad. Only instead of regular onion, I chopped some scallions, and instead of opening a can of Israeli pickles, I used some pickled muffaletta olive salad that we had already open in the fridge. It came out a little different, obviously, but not less yummy. In fact, we just had it for dinner and enjoyed the combination of flavors so much that I got inspired to write this post and let you all know that you should try it too.
I do not usually measure my ingredients, I do it by eye, and I taste to adjust the flavors. So there is no recipe this time, just the list of ingredients above. Have fun playing with it and be creative. And if you come up with some other fun combinations, I would love it if you shared them with me.
