Recipe: Olive Oil Poached Tombo Tuna

Ingredients

• 2 tuna steaks cut in half- will give you four 3-4 oz pieces
• extra virgin olive oil - about 1 1/2 cups
• 2 cloves garlic - smashed but whole
• 8 sprigs fresh aromatic herbs - anything you like
• salt
• black pepper
• smoked paprika

Instructions

Step 1

Alright today we're doing a taco tuna poached in olive oil. Kind of interesting way to cook tuna and very easy of course. Take a very small pot. Basically small is it will fit the amount of meat you have. I have 2 tuna steaks I cut in half. You'll see that in a second. So I put about an inch of extra virgin olive oil in there. I'm going to crush 2 cloves of garlic. But basically, what I want is a really flavorful oil mixture and then we'll poach our tuna right in there.

Step 2

Now, I'm just going to keep this pretty simple. I'm going to go garlic and just whatever fresh herbs I have around. This is from my garden, some thymes, some rosemary, a little oregano, in fact that's lemon thyme right there. And you can use anything you want. In fact, today's demo's more of a technique, not so much a recipe.
Alright, same goes for the spice mix. I'm going to use black pepper, some smoked paprika, some salt. You can use any kind of spices you want, just whatever you're into. The technique is basically how to cook it in the oil. So what I did is I took my 2 tuna steaks. Again, I'm using the albacore tuna also know as Tambo. And I'm going to give it a nice splash of this seasoning mixture. And again, make sure you always coat all sides. Hold your hands up high so it sprinkles evenly. You've heard that trick before. Alright, so basically once my tuna was all seasoned, again, very important get all sides. That's also going to be for presentation when we slice it. We don't want side has spice and one side it doesn't.

Step 3

Alright, you're going to put your oil mixture on the stove on a low heat, medium low heat just until the herbs start to kind of bubble. Alright, and at that point the olive oil will be hot enough and you will have extracted a lot of that garlic and herb flavor into the oil. Then we're going to turn it off. We're going to add our tuna into this hot oil. And basically, it's going to cook in about 5 minutes for me. Now you might want yours cooked all the way through, fine. You might only want to put this for a minute just to kind of cook the outside with that hot oil. That's okay too if you like it rare.

Step 4

Alright, so what I did, because my oil now is pretty much come all the way down the temperature because the tuna was cold, I put it on low. And I just gave it like 3 or 4 minutes on low, very low. So again, I don't want to cook it all the way through. Personal taste, I want a little bit of pink in the middle. But it's really nice because you got that spice mix on the outside. You got it poached very gently in that really flavorful herb and garlic oil. And I think that works really nice.
So for presentation here, see how pink in the middle. I took one of those medallions. I cut it twice so it gives me 3 pieces. Now what I use as a base was this incredibly delicious artichoke crab and potato croquet. I'm going to show you tomorrow, also known as crap cake with potato and artichoke. I arranged my nice medium tuna on top here, artfully of course. Clean you plate. And then I covered it but I surrounded it with a beautiful drizzle of our citronette. Remember, we made that last week? Into the citronette I added just a little bit of a hot sauce just to give it a little just another little kick.

Step 5

Alright and there is my delicious first coarse Tambo tuna poached in olive oil on top of my delicious crab artichoke and potato croquet. I'm going to show that tomorrow. Another thing you can do here which I think is a nice trick. You could actually put into the tuna the hot oil like I showed you. But don't put the heat back on. Just threw it off, let it sit in that oil. Let it come down the temperature. Refrigerate it in the oil. And then when you want to make a delicious tuna salad or a salad Nisswa with the egg and the green bean. I should double that salad. But anyway, you can crumble that cold tuna over a salad. That's going to be like the best tuna you'll ever had. So you can serve this warm like I have right now. You can cook it through a little more. Or you can actually just let it cool in that oil. And you'll have a beautiful what like people called tuna confi to top your salad with. Either way, I hope you give it a try and enjoy. And make sure you stay tuned for the crab potato croquet. Enjoy!