The Tuna Melt | Kenji's Cooking Show

Hi everyone, I'm Kenji, I'm home and I'm going to make a

tuna

melt

. So

tuna

milk was actually one of the first things I learned to cook. I learned to do it with my dad. so I'm going to do it in a specific way you don't have to use these same ingredients you know sometimes I like to do celery and red onion sometimes I have celery and chives in here you know I like to have that celery for the crunch um and I like to have some kind of allium, you know, whether it's chives, red onions, shallots or whatever, maybe even garlic, but no, you don't have to do that if you don't want to.

So you can do just tuna, if you prefer, you can do chopped pickles, some people like that, so finally I'm going to start by dicing my celery, just a broth, okay, and then I'll do some scallions as well so the tuna mix. the way I learned to make a tuna belt. I remember when I was a kid and I was home one day on a Saturday night with my dad. I don't know where my mom was at that time. I think she maybe she was out of town. I was home with my dad on a Saturday night and he wanted to make a steak for dinner, but all we had was a big block of frozen meat in the freezer, um, so I remember him taking out that freezer taking out that block of meat . out of the freezer and he realized it wasn't defrosting in time and he was trying to cut it with a knife and I was looking at him in the kitchen and he said hey ken give me the hammer so I went to the closet and brought it .

The hammer and what he did was he put the tip of the knife on the stake and he started hammering the back of it and then around the third hit the knife broke into four or five pieces that weren't flying around the kitchen so Tip , if you have a frozen block of meat, don't try to cut it with a knife and a hammer, it won't work, and then that happened and he said, hey, let's make tuna

melt

. for dinner, go get the tuna and so I did, and that was my first exposure to tuna melt, um, and we did it with tuna, tuna salad, American cheese, um, on plain white bread that wasn't toasted, oh, by the way, I'm going to toast mine.

I like to toast my bread to melt tuna, this is, you know, just sliced ​​bread, it's what you want, you can do it on the grill or you can do it in the toaster. I'm making it under the broiler, there's nothing special about making it on the broiler, in fact the toaster would work better. I just don't have a toaster. Okay, so you don't need fancy tuna. Packed in water is fine. You don't need the oil pack. You do want to drain it because you don't. I don't want watery tuna salad, but I'll

show

you the trick I like to do for my tuna salad that makes it good regardless of the quality of the tuna.

This is a good way to make tuna salad. I have tuna, save the fancy stuff like a nice salad or something where you're really going to have big chunks of tuna, okay tuna, this is some homemade mayonnaise, um, I made this a moment ago, um, I'll link to a video in the description to

show

you how I made this mayonnaise but you can use a couple tablespoons of homemade store bought mayonnaise salt and pepper and then oh where's my here we go pepper salt you can too add, you know, lemon. lemon juice zest if you want and then here's the trick so I'm going to start mixing this and at this stage you want to know you want to fork the tuna but you don't want to I don't want to fork it too much and then what we do when we start adding oil of olive, a really good extra virgin olive oil, a couple of tablespoons at a time or with tape, sorry, a couple of teaspoons at a time and I'm going to add. quite a bit, it's going to end up being probably like a quarter cup here, um, and I love the way it makes it really velvety, adds a lot of fresh olive oil flavor, adds a little bit of bitterness. grassy aroma, I think it is by far the best way to make tuna salad.

I started making it this way after I ate it, so Anna Sortin, who is a chef in Boston, had a restaurant called Oleana, which I think is still there, but I haven't done it. I lived in Boston for a while, but Olianna was a wonderful Mediterranean restaurant or -ism of a Mediterranean restaurant and they have these deviled eggs where they fill them with this confit tuna and yolk mixture that has a ton of olive oil and that combination. or yeah, really good tuna and fancy olive oil, I just love it so then I started doing it with my not so fancy tuna and I found that it really makes the flavor pop too.

Now, let's try it a little. more um, if you wanted, you can also add lemon juice, lemon zest, you can use chopped herbs like parsley or chives, dill if you want, if you like dill, whatever you want, but you see how I added a ton of olive oil. olive. but it doesn't look greasy and that's because the olive oil goes into that emulsion and that's fine no more forking make our second side of the bread work well now I'm also going to cut up some cheddar cheese. you could use the classic American, you know, tuna melt, but I like cheddar, this is an extra strong total milk, let's do it, we want a good topping here, okay, and then a tomato.

I've been managing to find these like actually. Pretty decent tomatoes even though it's February right now, I found some decent tomatoes on the safe street of all places, a general rule of thumb for tomatoes is that you generally know when they're out of season if you buy tomatoes on the winter. the smaller the tomato or especially the smaller the type of tomato the better because the reason winter tomatoes are so bad is because they are picked when they are very firm because they have to be shipped and so Therefore, larger tomatoes are picked when they are even firmer because they are more delicate, they are heavier, so they will crush under their own weight if you pick them when they are too firm and too soft, while smaller tomatoes, like cherry tomatoes, grape tomatoes, they kind of tend to be picked when they're riper, so if you're buying tomatoes in the winter, look for smaller tomatoes in general, and the smaller the tomato, the better it is.

This is a type of heirloom tomato from Safeway. street, okay, good enough for my bread, no, now we want to leave the broiler on, should we put more sodium inside or outside? Let's go outside. I like it more toasted on the outside. Okay, a little mayonnaise, melted tuna. needs a lot of mayonnaise when I was a kid it was hellman's here on the west coast it's dukes actually when I was a kid it was hellmann's or cupi more likely it was koopie on va our tuna mix and this by the way would be delicious just as a sort of salad cold tuna or with crackers or whatever you know, you don't have to turn it into tuna melt.

I like to add a couple of tomato slices and, as always, season the tomatoes with a little salt. Hello shabu, how? Are you making pepper pebbles in that cheese? I'm going to put this on a little sizzling plate here so it doesn't melt in the oven and that tuna mixture also tends to get a little juicy like it's dripping off the edges, it's not like that. I'm going to soak your bread, but it might drip from the edges. Now, this is going to roast down here. That's going to take about a minute, so I'll come back in just a minute and we're melted and ready to go. look well, what looks good, so let's close it, since we all know that triangles taste better, so let's cut them into triangles. fork to scrape all those a little stuffed this one oh shaboom oh I got my finger there okay some cheese sit down good girl there you go guys girls non-binary friends this is the way I make it my tuna will melt and I'll see you Next time, bye, hello everyone, I'm Kenji.

There are 22 million children in this country who rely on school lunches for nutritious meals and with schools closed now more than ever, organizations like No Child Hungry can use your support, so I'm asking you to join. I, uh, click the link in the description below to donate some money. No amount is too small or too large. Thank you very much and stay safe.