The Better Way To Make New York Deli-Style Tuna Salad

Today we’re making a healthy tuna salad or veggie tuna. It’s easy and perfect for summer!

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****PRINT RECIPE WITH INSTRUCTIONS AND PROCESS SHOTS****
https://www.sipandfeast.com/healthy-tuna-salad/

INGREDIENTS
3 5-ounce cans solid water-packed tuna well drained
1/2 cup (50g) finely diced green onion
3/4 cup (75g) finely diced red cabbage
3/4 cup (100g) minced carrot food processor or box grater works great
3/4 cup (100g) finely diced red bell pepper
1 teaspoon celery seed
2 teaspoons soy sauce
1/2 cup (120g) light mayonnaise
1/2 cup (120g) greek yogurt plus more as needed
salt and pepper to taste

VIDEO EDITOR:
Billy Mark: @bluecrestproductions

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Today we’re going to make a healthy New York deli tuna salad. It’s also known as veggie tuna salad. Here are the ingredients. Let’s make it right now. Okay, so we’re going to go over the ingredients quickly. Uh I made deli New York deli tuna salad last year, the traditional one. That video did amazingly well even to this day. It’s still one of the best performing videos on this show. It’s always up there. We always get comments every day about it. I think people a lot of people were fascinated um of these deli salads, you know, like New York City, New York metro deli salads. All all delies basically do everything the same. They all learn from each other. I guess they have like this deli, you know, uh round table, you know, or whatever. But it’s it’s essentially the same. They all use chunk white, okay, or just albaore, I guess, if it’s a fancy deli. They squeeze the water out of it. Ton of water out of it. Almost no delies are using fancy, you know, yellow fin tuna in oil. But for this recipe, because we’re making a healthy one, you definitely can. Using three cans of this albaore for this recipe. These are about 5 oz each. Okay? But use either one you like. For the vegetables, because this is a veggie tuna, we have a half a cup of green onion that I sliced. Okay? Like so. 3/4 cup of red bell pepper. That was about maybe 3/4 of a large red bell pepper. So, I finally diced it. Uh, we’re only going to need about 3/4 cup of red cabbage. So, it’s going to just be a tiny bit of that. We’re going to grate it. We’re going to do the same thing with the carrot. So, 3/4 cup grated carrot. 1 teaspoon of celery seed. 2 tsp of low sodium soy sauce. Okay, that’s going to boost the flavor. It’s going to help it taste better. And then for these two ingredients, I have half a cup of Greek yogurt. That’s 5% fat, but you can use no fat if you like. And then I have a half a cup of white mayo. So, I worked in a few delies as a kid uh when I was a youngster. And each one had a healthy tuna salad. And they all did it a little differently. One place actually just did balsamic vinegar. They had no mayo in there. It was nice. And they did it with a ton of vegetables. But most of the places still will use a light mayo. Regular deli salads are always mixed with heavy mayo. Really thick, heavy mayo. High calorie mayo helps all the salads come together. The trick to making all of these salads better, and that includes this one, is you have to put it in the refrigerator overnight. You do. Okay. All delies, they always work the same. Everything gets wrapped at the end of the night. Everything gets taken out in the morning. Okay. Person decides, is this one good? Can I keep it? Yes, it’s still good. And then it gets remixed. And then everything looks perfect in the deli counter for you to come and buy every day. All right. Let’s make this one right now. All right. All right. So, let’s just I’ll show you the carrots now. Because it’s appearance, I would start off by peeling these. Okay? And if you can just go do yourself a favor and get a big one big thick carrot. We bought a bag of carrots and a few last few times it all it comes with just tiny carrots in there. So, look through the bag and or if your place sells them loosely, yeah, just get a big one. Three carrots. We need 3/4 cup. Grated it. Now, listen, these aren’t these numbers are not like set in stone. If you want a lot more vegetables in your tuna, I mean, God, you can do you could do three times the amount of vegetables. So, you’re still getting the protein from a tuna, but you’re getting a ton more vegetables in it. I’m just going to cut off the ends here of these carrots. Like so. And then I like this hole right here. Okay, this hole is perfect. It will give you small enough, but it won’t take forever to do it. Now, listen. If you want to break out the food processor here for all this stuff, I re do it. Okay? I only use a food processor when I have to in these videos. I do that for everything. KitchenAid like that thing that sits in back here. I only use that only use it when I have to. I don’t think I’ve ever Have I ever made a video with a KitchenAid using it? It just disenfranchises too many people. You know, it’s a $500 $400 piece of equipment. A lot of people a lot of people are never going to buy one. But here’s the thing. So, I’ve seen a lot of comments on our website for the pizza recipes specifically from elderly folks, like people who say they’re 80 years old. They don’t they can’t sit there and need. They just, you know, they really want to use their KitchenAid. So, we do have the instructions on how to make a pizza dough. Okay, let me give you instructions to how to knead with a with one of these things. Throw it in there, put it on two, get it mixed, turn it on to level four, let it go for three to five minutes. I mean, there’s like, you know, there’s not really any instructions to it. That thing will just do faster than what any even a strong person can do with their hands. You you’ll tire out. Yeah. But that’s who I think is asking for the KitchenAid instructions. Yeah. I’ve seen people say like they have arthritis and their hands, they just can’t need. So, like they really need it for that. Totally get it. Yeah. Okay. And that’s about 3/4 cup of carrots. I’m just going to peel, you know, buy one red cabbage like so. and just peel off the outer edge of the cabbage. You just need so little of this. This is probably too much. So, I’m just going to cut off a little bit on the side here. Okay. Same thing again. You can use that one. You could go even smaller, but it’s easy just to do like that. And you don’t have to do this. You could just finally finally uh chop it. This actually kind of reminds me of the ingredients in a vegetable cream cheese that you’d get at a bagel store. Yeah, it does. I love vegetable cream cheese. Me, too. Yeah. I don’t think when I made it the other day, I think I chopped this cabbage. I think I chopped it because to be honest with you, even with that, that’s the biggest hole setting there. It’s probably maybe too fine. Nah, it’s good. Yeah, we’ll just take a little bit more here. Okay. I think that’s plenty. I think that’s more than you need. I measured them when I did the recipe the other day. I measured it. I don’t know why I was being so precise, but it it truly doesn’t matter. All right, so I have a bowl, big bowl here. Let’s just get everything in that we just um chopped. It’s actually half a cup of green onion, but again, don’t worry. 3/4 cup of that beautiful finely diced bell pepper. And then tuna. Tuna. Tuna. Tuna. Delies. They have the real big cans of tuna. They’re huge. All right. huge. Make sure you clean your tops of your cans. I already did that. Okay. And I’m just going to show you because I’m not going to be I’m not by the sink right now. So, I just have another bowl right here. So, you do this in the sink and then just carefully because the the can itself can like come up and cut you. But, you need to squeeze all of this liquid out of here. Okay? Ton of it without cutting yourself. Now, this isn’t the best way to do it. There’s other ways that you can squeeze even more, but basically delies will squeeze so much it will become a flake almost super dry. One tool you can use as a home, you know, doing this at home is one of these. Okay, you can take all your tuna now. Put it in here and then and what tool is that? Press it down. This is a ricer. It’s not meant for making tuna salad, but it works very, very well. All right, I’m going to do this for the next three cans. Just get all the liquid, as much liquid as you can out of it. Here are the three pretty dry cans. You want it to come out like that without there being really any water in there. But do not worry if you get water in there. It’s not the biggest deal because you can just drain it again the next day, which you’re going to have to do regardless of how much liquid you get out of there. All these vegetables are going to are going to wick water, too. So, you just drain it a little bit and then you remix it with a little bit of your healthy mayo or your Greek yogurt, which is what all delies do. Now, the better way to do this is just to stick the tuna in an empty bowl and uh so you can flake it better, but I’ll just do it against the side here. Or just use your hands. Just get um get some gloves and use your hands, which is again what they do. It’s always mixed by hand. I have lots of fond memories working in the delies when I was when I was young. And I say a kid, I was like, you know, my first job, I was 14. I was a dishwasher at a deli. They wouldn’t let me work in the front. I don’t think they were allowed to. But then the other ones, as I got a little bit older, like 15, 16. Then I knew then I then I was like always asking questions. I wanted to learn how every salad was made, you know, wanted to work the grill, the fryer, all that stuff. And I did. How many bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches do you think you made in your life? Honestly, without not exaggerating, I would say probably four to 5,000 because I, you know, I worked for four years at these places, you know, and I would always want to be on the be on the grill duty. The places I worked at, like, you know, you get the egg and cheese orders, everybody take all the orders, and whoever like took the orders, if the grill if they weren’t making anything, that that would be the person who would go to the grill. Yeah. And then, like, if you liked it, you would stay back there. And then, like, as more orders came in, you just be like, I’m I’m back here now, you know? But some people hated it. There were some people who never wanted to do that. You get a little hectic if there’s like 30 or 40 sandwiches, you know, wasn’t high-end stuff that I was making there. Okay, so this is one teaspoon of celery seed. And that’s the two teaspoons of low sodium soy sauce because I’m trying to, you know, be a little healthy here. But if you’re feeling adventurous, use more soy sauce than that. And you can use regular. So just mix this up and let it sit for about 10 minutes before you do your mix of of your yogurt and mayo. This is looking fabulous. This is looking better than last time cuz I think I used more vegetables, right? I was going to say it looks heavier on the veg. Looks good, right? Yeah. Tara’s just asking me if I really made that many uh bacon, egg, and cheeses, but I think I did because when I worked there, which was 1993 to like 98, I guess, um bacon, egg, and cheeses were like $150, $2, you know, or less. And I remember the owner, they would always, you know, everybody paid with cash for everything back then. He would just be pulling the money out of the register every hour depending on where you go. I guess the cheapest place would be like $5, but I’ve spent $10 on a egg and cheese sandwich. Yeah, it’s everything is, you know, they they measure in you can measure inflation by a lot of ways. One of the most popular ways is to use the Big Mac because a Big Mac is sold in all 50 states. So you can see the price change over the decades. But yeah, you could definitely go buy a bacon, egg, and cheese and uh you know, around here. I’m putting in the/2 cup of each. Now listen, you can do this with a spoon, but it’s better to do it this way. It just is. Somebody asked me the other day, I kept calling bro gloves. He’s like, “Where do you get the bro gloves from?” Like, first of all, they’re not called bro gloves, you know? And uh I’m like, that’s making fun of like the people on Instagram and Tik Tok. They’re like young men. They like invest in crypto and they make barbecue all the time. Like they’re just like they’re like a caricature. Like that’s what I meant. Like bro gloves. They’re the ones who use them. Okay. The tech bros. Yeah. Tech bros. Bros. They’re just bros. Like you know everyone I don’t want to be labeled a bro. I don’t want to be a bro. Everyone’s a bro. Our kids call us bro. But anyway, to answer that guy’s question, I don’t know where I got them from. Probably Costco. Those ones? No. You can’t get those from Amazon. Oh, you could definitely get them from Amazon, but I always try to I don’t want to ever steer you towards Amazon because like this stuff is so like a good example is the cherry pepper recipes. You know, we get them for $3 here. They’re just $17 on Amazon. So, it’s like no, I’m like if the price is in line, then I’ll then I’ll like post it and say it, you know. So, what I like about using the hands here is I can like really get this tuna to almost like that super flake consistency. You’re probably thinking to yourself, why don’t you start with light tuna, you dumbass? You know, like like chunk light. Like you’re you’re you’re right. I could have done that. Isn’t chunk light considered like inferior? I I heard that. Yep. I feel like I grew up hearing that. Yeah. Like don’t don’t buy the chunk light. Well, it’s just like they say don’t buy the crushed tomatoes now. Now everybody buys crushed tomatoes, you know? That’s true. Yeah. It’s probably the same people saying the chunk light and the crushed tomatoes. That’s well mixed. Perfect. It’s not going to be that good right now, but give it a taste anyway. You can season it with salt and pepper if you like. I didn’t put any pepper in here. I got to say, I love this one. I really do. If you’re worried about black specks, use white pepper. But I got to tell you, that black pepper and white pepper are not really interchangeable. White pepper just has a different taste. I am going to put a little salt in here regardless of the fact that tuna is salty and the soy sauce. Yeah, it was not a lot of soy sauce. It was only two teaspoons. Here’s the deal. I’m going to get this in the refrigerator for at least a couple hours before we bring down the taste tester. But ideally overnight, this super dry mass right here is going to be liquidy if you let it go to the next day. By the time you see him have it, it won’t be that way. It’s only going to be a couple hours. And then you just remix. Okay. A little bit more Greek yogurt. A little bit more light mayo. All right. There we go. Thank you. Make sure you really cover that so you don’t stink up your fridge. Okay. So, it actually is the next day. And you can see how I look different. I wear different clothes. I could have worn the same clothes and said it was the next day, too. But it really is the next day. And you can see it’s the next day by for a couple reasons. You see how dry this gets? Okay. Okay. A lot of the mayo and the yogurt just it just absorbs in there. But it also there’s also liquid now on the bottom of our bowl. Now, not that much. Like you can see it kind of scooping down there. So, this one has a lot less than other ones that that we’ve done. So, I probably because I just like really squeezed uh a lot of the water out. But like I’ll show you see like how it’s coming here. So, I’m just going to just just absorb it. Now, in the other one, I used like I showed like a lot of delies will use crackers, they’ll use bread, you know, like just old uh like just white bread and um they’ll mix it in. They’ll almost make like a pinade of the bread for the tuna as well. So, they save money by not having to use as much tuna and nobody knows. But, you know, I think people are asking now because so many people like want to eat gluten-free, which in the past you would think tuna would be like a gluten-free product, but it’s not. for the most part the way deli’s make it. Now, I’m talking about the, you know, the regular New York style one. Okay, so I got most of the moisture out of there. For me, that’s a little too dry for you. That might be fine, especially if you’re trying to be like really healthy here. But I’m just going to mix in some more yogurt and some more mayo. Just like a spoonful of each, not so much. And this is just 5%. Yeah, 5% fier uh yogurt. Okay, we’ll start with like that much. And this is what delies do the next day, right? They they like add the mayonnaise or whatever to kind of reconstitute it. Yeah, they always do it. They’ll like looking through the case, you know, bring them out. There’s like they don’t they’re not marking dates and it’ll often be just some guy or girl be like, “This one smells all right.” And then they’ll remix it with more mayo and stuff like that. I’m, you know, I’m joking, but I’m not. You know, things haven’t changed much. No matter how many times the health department comes into these places, you know, places run their run the place the way they want to run it. And a lot of these delies are old, you know, they’re very old school places. They’re not like corporate owned. They’re not like um like franchises that everything has to be, you know, done a certain way. I’m not saying they’re bad. Some places run a really great ship and they’re like everything is super fresh. The places I worked at were they were all good. Okay, now look at how smooth that looks here. Okay, that’s perfect. Perfect. Healthy moderately healthy tuna. night and day between yesterday or day to next day, you know, just so much better. It’s two things. It’s that it’s really cold now, like super cold, and that the flavors have come together. All right, let’s make a nice sandwich for the taste tester. Okay, and I got two pieces of bread. Uh we’ll do a deli wrap for him. He’ll like, he’ll prefer that. So, I just have a piece of parchment paper here that, you know, they would just have regular wrap, but I’m just using what I have. And I got some nice bib lettuce. I like this type of lettuce. It’s really good for sandwiches. You can just buy it like comes in a container in a lot of stores. Good enough, Tara. Looks delicious. Yeah. Not a hugely thick sandwich, but still good. You know, the reason you do a deli wrap is so you could everything comes together in it. So, I’m going to do two two layers. So, the first layer, just like this, you just take your pieces, just pull kind of just make it nice and tight. And then kind of like we’re forcing everything together. Okay, so that’s one. Then I just have thicker paper here. That’s just butcher paper. You want to cut this in half. Okay, just try to get your center point using a serrated knife. Okay, that looks good. That’s like a nice size sandwich. All right, James, you need no introductions. You are the taste tester. Um, I am going to I I’ve wrapped up a nice sandwich. I’m going to give you just half of it. I don’t think you need to eat all this right now. This looks good. I really like this. I’m like not that hungry though, so I’m not going to like eat a lot of it. But after bad, it’s really good. I remixed right now with some more uh mayo and yogurt. I I mean, what do you think of the vegetables? So, it’s very different than the other one with ton of vegetables in it. Texture do you like? Do you not like it? Gives it more crunch, which I kind of do like. It’s a regular tuna salad sandwich. Like the lettuce gives it some crunch. There’s like celery and stuff in this which makes it really good. There’s no celery in it actually. That’s green onion. Yeah, you could you can put celery. I kind of I kind of omitted that one. But you know that I put celery in my regular uh New York deli tuna. I don’t know. This is very good. Like I just really like I just really like all the deli salads and especially on a sandwich. Yeah. Just clean off the back. So yeah. Um don’t eat too much. You got to do another taste test right after this one. I’m going to give this a nine out of 10. Thank you. I mean, there’s not much to say about it, honestly. Well, you did. Okay. You You did the other one and you didn’t That was I don’t know if you recall. It was a while ago. It was when we did um a tuna melt, but I like left the tuna sitting for a while with the cheese and you I think you weren’t weren’t too happy about it. Yeah. Maybe. I don’t think I liked it that much. Yeah. Now, that tuna in general though, forget about the tuna melt. Which one do you think? That tuna or this tuna? This one. This one. Huh? Yeah. I really like this one. Good. It’s a lot better. Good. I’m glad you like it. I’m glad this. Yeah, cuz I’m going to eat this one. All right, we’ll take a nine. Take this away from me before you I don’t really know what else to say here. You know, he um he was a man of man of few words today for this taste test. There’s not much to say. Just tuna salad. But we we always appreciate your reviews and uh I will take a nine any day. Until next time, see you. See you. See you. See you. How was that? I don’t want to say see you. See you. See you. See you. See you. See you.