The Tuna Melt | Kenji's Cooking Show

hey everyone it's kenji i'm at home and i'm gonna be making a tuna melt um so tuna milk actually one of the very first things i learned how to cook um i learned how to make it from my dad um i'm gonna so i'm gonna do it in a specific way you don't have to use these same ingredients um you know sometimes i like doing celery and red onions sometimes i got celery and scallions here um you know i do like to have that celery for the crunch um and i do like to have some sort of allium you know so whether that's scallions or red onions or shallots or whatever um maybe even garlic um but you don't you don't have to do that if you don't want to you can do just tuna if you prefer you could do chopped up pickles some people like that um so i'm going to start by finally dicing my celery just one stock okay um and then do some scallions as well so the tuna the tuna mel the way i learned to make a tuna belt um i remember when i was um a kid and i was home one day on a saturday night with my dad i don't know where my mom was at the time i think maybe out of town i was at home with my dad on a saturday night and he wanted to make steak for dinner but all we had was this big frozen block of beef in the in the freezer um and so i remember him pulling out that freezer pulling that block of meat out of the freezer realizing it wasn't thawing in time and he was trying to cut into it with a knife and i was watching him in the kitchen and he goes hey ken give me the hammer and so i went to the closet and i brought him the hammer and what he did was he put the tip of the knife down on the stake and started hammering the back of it and then at around the third stroke the knife shattered into like four or five pieces that weren't flying around the kitchen so um word of advice if you have a frozen block of beef don't try and cut into it with a knife um and a hammer it's not gonna work um and then uh that happened then he said hey ken we're gonna make tuna melts for dinner go get the tuna and so i did and that was my first exposure to tuna melts um and we did it with tuna tuna salad american cheese um on plain white bread that wasn't toasted oh i'm gonna toast mine by the way i like to toast my bread for tuna melts this is a you know just sliced bread is what you want you can do it in the broiler or you can do it in the toaster i'm doing it under the broiler there's nothing special about doing in the broiler in fact the toaster would work better i just don't own a toaster um all right so you don't need fancy tuna um water packed is fine you don't need the oil pack stuff you do want to drain it because you don't want watery tuna salad but i'll show you the trick that i like to do for my tuna salad that makes it good no matter no matter the quality of your tuna this is a this is a good way to make tuna salad alright so i got tuna going in save the fancy stuff for like a nice salad or something where you're really going to have nice big chunks of tuna all right tuna going in this is some homemade mayo um i made this just now um i will link to a video uh in the description to show you how i made this one made mayo but you can use store-bought couple tablespoons of homemade mayo uh salt and pepper and then oh where's my oh here we go pepper salt you could also add you know lemon zest lemon juice if you want um and then here's the trick so i'm gonna i'm gonna start mixing this up and at this stage you kind of want to you know you want to fork the tuna but you don't want to you don't want to fork with it too much and then what we do as we start adding olive oil so really good extra virgin olive oil a couple of tablespoons at a time or tape sorry a couple teaspoons at a time and i'm gonna add quite a bit it's gonna end up being like probably like a quarter cup in here um and it's i just love the way it makes it sort of really velvety it adds a lot of fresh olive oil flavor it adds that you know a little bit of bitterness grassiness aroma i think it's by far the best way to make tuna salad um i started making it this way after i i ate um so anna sortin who's a chef in boston she had a restaurant called oleana which i believe is still there but i haven't lived in boston for a while but olianna was a wonderful mediterranean restaurant or ism from a mediterranean restaurant and they have these deviled eggs where they fill the eggs with this tuna confit tuna and yolk mixture that has a ton of olive oil in it and that combination of like yeah really nice tuna and fancy olive oil i just love it um and so here then then i started doing it to my not so fancy tuna and i found that it really makes the flavor pop also all right now let's taste it a tiny bit more um if you wanted to um you could also add lemon juice lemon zest you can use chopped up herbs like parsley or chives dill if you want if you like dill whatever you want really but you see how i've added a ton of olive oil but it doesn't look greasy and that's because it's the olive oil sort of gets incorporated into that emulsion and that's about all right no more forking get our second side the bread going all right now i'm gonna also slice up some cheese cheddar cheese you could use american sort of the classic you know diner tuna melt but i like cheddar this is a total milk extra sharp let's get it we want some good coverage on here all right and then a tomato i've been managing to find these like actually pretty decent tomatoes even though it's february right now i've found some decent tomatoes at fairway fairway safeway of all places a general rule of thumb for tomatoes is that you know when they're off season if you're buying tomatoes in the winter generally the smaller the tomato or the especially the smaller the type of tomato the better it's going to be because the reason winter tomatoes are so bad is because they're picked when they're very firm because they have to be shipped and so larger tomatoes are picked when they're even more firm because they're more delicate they're heavier so they kind of get crushed on their own weight if you pick them when they're too firm too soft whereas smaller tomatoes like cherry tomatoes grape tomatoes things like that tend to be picked when they're riper and so if you're buying tomatoes in the winter look for smaller tomatoes in general um and the smaller the tomato the better it'll be this is this is some kind of heirloom tomato from safeway fairway all right good enough for my bread nope now we want to leave the broiler on all right should we put extra sodium side on the inside or the outside let's go on the outside i like it extra toasty on the outside all right little mayo tuna melt needs plenty of mayo when i was growing up it was hellman's out here on the west coast it's dukes actually when i was growing up it was either hellmann's or cupi more likely was koopie on goes our tuna mixture and this by the way would be is delicious just as a plain cold sort of tuna salad or with crackers or whatever you know you don't have to make it into a tuna melt i like to put a couple slices of tomato and as always you season your tomatoes a little salt hi shabu how you doing pepper shingle on that cheese i'm gonna put this on a little sizzle platter here so that it doesn't uh melt into the oven and that tuna mixture can also tend to get a little bit juicy like drip off the edges it's not gonna soak into your bread but it might drip off the edges all right now this is going under here to broil um that'll take about a minute so i will be back in just one minute and we are melty and good to go right does that look good what does that look good all right so let's close it off as we all know triangles taste better so we're going to cut it into triangles here that's a sloppy one got a slopper and check that out yummy i'm gonna need a fork to scrape all those up kind of overstuffed this one oh shaboom oh got my finger there all right some cheese sit good girl there you go all right guys gals non-binary pals this is the way i make my tuna melt and i will see you next time bye-bye hey everyone it's kenji there are 22 million kids in this country that rely on school lunches for nutritious meals and with schools closed now more than ever organizations like no kid hungry can use their support so i'm asking you to join me uh click the link in the description below to donate some money no amount is too small or too big thank you very much and stay safe [Music] you

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 270,026

Rating: 4.9481235 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: CfnlQFTmbsY

Length: 10min 25sec (625 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 31 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/highpriestess420]

Whew that was a lot of mayo and olive oil. Nonetheless I know what I'm making for lunch tomorrow haha

[u/Anti-Baby]

I haven't watched this yet, but I have been hugely enjoying Chef John's open faced tuna melts for years.