Feel like your tuna salad needs a twist? Try these tips on for size — from spicy kicks
to flavor bombs to one ingredient that won't make sense until you've tried it.
Keep watching for all this and more.
Tuna salad is a staple dish for both everyday lunches and special occasions. The classic recipe
combines ingredients such as canned tuna, onion, celery, carrots, pickles, mayo, and salt and
pepper to taste. However, tuna salad is easily customizable to your own personal preferences,
as you can easily omit ingredients you don't like and replace them with ingredients you do like.
In a way, the only mandatory elements are the tuna and the mayo, which hold everything together.
A fun way to change up your tuna salad is by experimenting with ingredients
of different textures. You can add crisp lettuce, crunchy potato chips,
or crumbly bacon to break up the monotony of an otherwise texturally bland dish.
Yet another way to mix up your tuna salad is with new flavors. For example,
spices that will take your tuna up a notch include curry powder, dill, or lemon pepper.
These work because their bold flavors complement the flavors of ingredients already in the dish.
And if you're really bored with your regular tuna salad, there's an ingredient you can add to give
the dish both a new texture and a new flavor. Adding pickled jalapeño juice to your tuna salad
can give it a creamier consistency, as it mixes in nicely with the mayo and gives the whole thing a
pleasant, spicy kick. Be warned, though: jalapeños are middle of the road in terms of heat level.
Even so, they can still pack some punch, so you should be cautious when adding jalapeño juice.
[Retching, yelling]
Barefeet in the Kitchen notes two tablespoons of the pickled jalapeno juice in its recipe but
recommends starting with less and increasing from there if you'd like more of a kick.
If you really want to whip up a spicy tuna salad, consider making the dish with
a little Mexican flair. One way to do this is to start out with your standard recipe
and then add a few extra ingredients that will kick the heat up a notch or two.
For example, Mexican Food Journal recommends adding avocado, cilantro, lime juice,
and serrano chiles. Keep in mind, however, that serrano chiles are much spicier than jalapenos.
Another way to give your tuna salad a Mexican twist is by adding ingredients like corn,
bell peppers, and onion. Cook at Home Mom
even suggests including homemade taco seasoning for extra flavor.
These Mexican-inspired tuna salads can be served with tostadas, lettuce wraps, or tortilla chips
to really bring the meal together. If you've got leftovers, remember that, when storing tuna salad,
the dish should be refrigerated. And if it's been sitting for five days, you'll want to toss it. Any
older than that and you risk food poisoning — which definitely isn't going to be fun.
"I'm dying."
"I was dying earlier today. And then I died. Now I'm dead."
Not all of us want to have our mouths set on fire by jalapenos or chiles, of course,
but there are plenty of other ways to add something extra to your basic tuna salad recipe.
For example, you might consider including a sweet element to tone down the spices.
Sweet and spicy are already a perfect combination, so why not apply this to tuna salad?
Budget Bytes recommends adding not only cracked pepper and cayenne pepper to a tuna salad,
but also brown sugar to balance out the heat. You should be mixing sugar into the recipe anyway,
as it pairs well with fish. With this in mind, brown sugar isn't really too far a stretch.
If you like that sweet and spicy combination but want to try something even more complex,
you could take things even further. MyRecipes has a version of tuna salad that includes hot
pepper sauce, as well as sweet peppers, brown sugar, and grated orange peel.
These ingredients will definitely give your dish a bit of a kick — but the
sweeter elements will help keep that heat in check, making for one heck of a tuna salad.
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