Why “Limited Illustration,” you ask?
(I know, I know, you don’t care. Play along.)
Due to various technical difficulties, I don’t have any prep
or ingredient pictures on this one—just a few pictures of the finished dish.
But I posted a picture of it on Facebook, and people seemed to like the look of it, so I
decided it would be worthwhile to post it here.
This one is (again) from Nigella Lawson; in this case, I’m
pulling a recipe from her book (and eponymous TV series) Forever Summer. Why am
I cooking from a summer cookbook in November, you ask? Because shut up, that’s
why.
Actually, it has to do with an impulse buy. I am fortunate in
that there is an actual, honest-to-gods fish market in the city where I live,
and they had some beautiful yellowfin tuna at a (relatively) reasonable price
when I looked in last week. So I took home this lovely fresh tuna, but had to
figure out what the hell to do with it. I happened upon this recipe, and the
rest was history, albeit in very circumscribed and obscure form.
Also, yellowfin tuna is a good/acceptable choice (depending
on the variety and fishing method) according to the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s very
useful (albeit depressing) Seafood Watch Website. They have a smartphone app as well.
However, I am aware that fresh tuna is not available
everywhere (don’t write in). If you can’t get it, you could try another type of
fish, but I would actually suggest using a New York strip steak or a boneless
ribeye steak instead. The flavor would be different, but similar, and a beef
steak can be seasoned and cooked in the same way.
The cooking is fairly simple. You paint the tuna (or steak,
or whatever) with a mixture made of 1 tablespoon of dark sesame oil and 1
teaspoon of prepared English mustard. Please note the word “prepared” here. The
first time I tried this dish, years ago, I thought Nigella meant dry mustard;
she doesn’t, and using powdered mustard will make this kind of pasty and gross.
She means this. If you can’t find it, she mentions using wasabi paste as a substitute, but I
think Dijon mustard would work as well, possibly mixed with a dab of
horseradish—English mustard is hotter than Dijon mustard.
Anyway, you paint the mustard/sesame oil mixture all over
the fish, and then you coat the fish with very coarsely cracked black
peppercorns. If your pepper mill works well on its coarsest setting, you're good to go. Mine doesn't, so I resorted to putting some peppercorns in a Ziploc bag and bashing them a bit with a frying pan. But if you’re part of the
I-only-cook-with-pre-industrial-revolution-methods brigade, a mortar and pestle
will work as well.
The next step is to heat a dry pan over high heat. I used my trusty cast-iron skillet for this, but as long as you don't use a non-stick pan, you should be fine. Nigella tells you to then sear the tuna quickly on all sides,
so that the outer edges are just cooked, but the inside is still raw/rare. Let
it cool a bit (or cool completely, if you like) slice it thinly, and serve.
What Nigella doesn’t mention is that if one’s kitchen has a
smoke detector, the smoke created by searing black peppercorns and tuna in a
red-hot pan may well set it off, even if one is running one’s exhaust fan. And
if one’s smoke detector is not battery-powered but is in fact wired directly
into one's home electrical grid, it will be very difficult to deactivate. This can
lead to one having to open one’s windows and patio door on a chilly, rainy
November evening to give the smoke a way out. And if all of that is going on, it’s
not really possible to take pictures of the cooking process. Just sayin’.
But I digress. I’ve served the tuna with some steamed
broccoli. This is a long-stemmed type of broccoli which is either marketed as
“baby broccoli” or “broccolini” depending on the store and the supplier. It’s
nice, but regular broccoli would work fine, as would broccoli raab, or
asparagus, or green beans, or whatever other vegetable appeals. I steamed the
broccolini until it was just cooked through. I also had some sesame noodles
alongside.
La Nige suggests dunking the tuna in soy sauce as you eat.
My take on this was to mix about 2 tablespoons soy sauce with about 1 tablespoon rice
wine vinegar (cider vinegar will do in a pinch) with a few drops of sesame oil
and a little bit of grated fresh ginger. A bit of grated or minced garlic in
addition to or instead of the ginger would be nice, too. It didn’t make it into
the photos for some reason, but I had a little bowl of this dipping sauce for
the tuna and the broccoli.
Anyway, it was good, and it looked pretty. Bon appetìt, y’all.
From Nigella Lawson’s Forever Summer:
Pepper-Seared Tuna
Those of my vintage may remember this dish from the
eighties fondly as Tataki of Tuna: a log of ludicrously rubied fish, rolled in
pepper, briefly seared and eaten finely sliced with shredded spring onions and
twiggy strips of cucumber. Dunk in soy as you eat or make up a few blobs of
sinus-clearing wasabi. If you do have some wasabi to hand, you can use this for
smearing over the tuna, before coating it with peppercorns, in place of the
English mustard stipulated below.
Ingredients:
1 tablespoon Asian sesame oil
1 teaspoon English mustard
¼ cup black peppercorns (crushed roughly)
1 lb sashimi-quality tuna fillet (cut in long even
thickness)
cucumber (cut into slender batons)
4 scallions (cut into strips)
Method:
1.
In a small bowl mix the oil and mustard, and use
a pastry brush to paint it on the tuna. Roll the tuna in the crushed
peppercorns so that the long sides of the log are covered, but the ends are
not.
2.
Heat a dry frying pan until it's very hot and
cook the tuna on all the long sides, searing the fish to about 3mm / one-eighth
of an inch in a circle around the edge. You'll be able to see how much of it's
cooked, because the ruby flesh will turn brown and the depth of the ring, if
you see what I mean, will be evident from the uncoated round ends. Take out of
the pan immediately and cool on a plate.
3.
With a sharp knife cut into the finest slices
you can and serve with the cucumber and scallions and soy, dipping sauce,
wasabi, as you please.
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