My Tuna Crunch Sandwiches from NYT Cooking | Kenji’s Cooking Show

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CREDITS
Shot by: Michael Weiner
Edited by: Alex Oh
Produced By: Kenji Lopez-Alt, Lena Davidson

going to make some tuna crunch sandwiches. This is a recipe of mine from the New York Times, uh, where I’m a crimp contributor. Um, you can find my articles and recipes there dating back quite a few years now on New York TimesCCooking.com. Um, all of my recipes, including this one, uh, as well as a lot of other great recipes. So, this is a real classic tuna sandwich. In fact, when I posted this recipe, some people were like, “Did we really need a recipe for this?” And yeah, maybe you don’t really need a recipe for this, but here’s how I like to make my tuna salad sandwich. Um, you know, when I was when I was working on this recipe, I was really curious about where um the idea of combining potato chips uh with a tuna sandwich came from. You know, is it something that everybody just independently discovered on their own in the lunchroom? Maybe. Some people posit that. Um, I think more likely though it’s actually because of the historical proximity of canned tuna and uh bagged potato chips. Both of them uh became popular in the 1950s and that’s around the time if you look at uh records that’s around the time you start seeing uh potato chip topped uh tuna casserles. Um and so I think that combination of tuna and potato chips uh gained popularity around that time when those two ingredients became popular uh independently and people realized they taste good together. Um I talked to quite a few people about their first experiences uh with this. Um Al u Alex Cornishelli, you know, Iron Chef Alex Cornoselli, her mother was the editor of my uh first cookbook, The Food Lab. Um she passed away a few years ago, but Alex said that her mother used to make these sandwiches when they were a kid. Um and that she loved them back then. Um I talked to Dan Pashman’s mother. Um Dan Pashman, who was the host of the Sporkful, um and his mother also said she was making them uh in the 60s. Um, so they go back quite a long ways. Um, my favorite tuna and potato chip sandwich in Seattle comes from Layers’s Sandwich Shop. Um, they do, uh, it’s a seasonal one. You know, they they actually use only locally caught tuna. Um, and it’s called the Captain Rick. That’s the name of the guy who catches the fish. Um, but they make they use locally caught tuna and they use barbecue potato chips, uh, which they insist on. Um, honestly, the type of chip doesn’t matter that much, but we’re gonna we’re gonna make them today with a couple different options. And uh maybe maybe Lena will we can do a blind taste test later to see uh to see how you like it. All right, so we’re going to start by making our tuna salad. This is tuna. Uh this is skipjack tuna. You know, you can use albaore skipj jack. Um I would recommend generally staying away from uh yellow fin just cuz it’s less sustainable and honestly like in a canned setting like this uh you’re not going to taste a huge difference. Um, I used olive oil packed tuna, but water packed tuna works fine. You’re going to drain that all out anyway. So, can of tuna, couple tablespoons of QP mayo or whatever mayo you like. I like to do quite a bit of olive oil. Um, when I lived in Boston, I used to go to this restaurant um, still there called Oolana, Chef Anna Sortun, and she did these really great deed eggs, um, which were, uh, deiled eggs with with comfi tuna, um, and a ton of olive oil. And that’s when I sort of started developing this taste for, uh, tuna salads with a lot of olive oil in them. So, two tablespoons of mayonnaise and three tablespoons of olive oil in there. And I’m also going to do tablespoon of pickle relish. I’ve got this one hard-boiled egg. Oops. No, that is a raw egg. Here. I’ve got a hard-boiled egg. It’s funny. I thought about swapping it out to do that to you on purpose and I didn’t need to. Sure you didn’t. Um, all right. So, this hard-boiled egg, um, I do it the way I always do my hard-boiled eggs, which is, um, rather than boiling them, I steam them. Um, I’ve got a full video about this, but essentially you you get a little bit of water steaming in the bottom of a saucepan, uh, you put the eggs in there, and then you cover it. Um, and they peel really, really well. Um, the only thing, uh, this is a little tangent. The only thing I found that makes a difference uh in how well an egg is going to peel um and I’ve done this through literally thousands of eggs and hundreds of uh testers, the only thing that’s going to make a difference in how your egg peels is whether you start it uh in uh already hot water or you start it cold. If you start it cold and slowly bring it up to temperature, which is the way I was taught to do it a long time ago, um your egg is going to have a much higher chance of sticking to the shell. Whereas if you lower it into already boiling water or lower it into a pan um of steaming of steam, uh it will peel much more easily. All right, what else are we putting in here? We’re going to put in about a tablespoon of parsley. I chopped way more parsley than I needed. Let’s do some chives in there. Also, herbs optional. You know, you could do you could do parsley, chives, teragon, dill. If you like dill. If you don’t like dill, you can just dill with it. Dill with it. That looks like a a reasonable amount of chive. There you go. I’ll do a little squeeze of lemon juice. This is altogether more complicated than a tuna salad really needs to be. If you want, you can just do a tuna and mayo, but we’re going we’re going whole tuna here. Um, and then let’s do about that much celery. Celery I like to cut it into long thin strips like this and then line them up and cut across them. All right. And finally, we’ll do a little red onion. So, couple tablespoons of red onion, which looks like probably about that much. Sometimes I do scallions, sometimes I do shallots, sometimes I do no onion at all. If I’ve got like a yellow onion or a white onion, I might do that. But I do, if I’ve got the red onion, I like the flavor of it. It’s a little bit sort of more pungent than a uh a uh a scallion or another type of onion. Um and I and I also like the beautiful color which is definitely not red despite the name. Pinch of salt. Black pepper. All right. You know, I went to um oh, what was the name of the what was the name of the Twin Pines or Lone Pine or No, that’s from Back to the Future. It’s um it’s there’s a shop that’s something pine on um on Orcus Island where they do a really great tuna melt. Um but the tuna salad on that sandwich has uh I think chopped pimentos in it which I really enjoy. Capers, olives, pimentos in a tuna salad. I think that’s delicious. Lone pine larder. You know what Tessa’s favorite lunch is? She likes to make a a tuna salad salad, which is a a salad with a scoop of tuna salad on it. That seems reasonable. Yeah. All right. How’s this taste? Too much relish. I’m going to go in and pick it all out. No, I’m not going to do that. All right. I think it tastes great. Um, so I’m going to divide this in half. And one half we’re going to do we’re going to make two sandwiches here. One half we’ll do with these um which uh Lena brought from uh Uajimaya. Yep. These are Kalby um umami salt flavored chips. Mhm. Salt. Yeast extract. MSG. and mushroom powder. These are pretty good. Comoo extract. Scallop extract. Wow. Okay. They’ve got all the umami ingredients. Not bad. All right. Those will be for there. And these this one we’re going to do with some tortilla chips. You know, if you’re going to use plain potato chips, generally I find uh that I prefer to to use something with a little more heft, like a ruffles, like a ruffle or a um uh like a kettle style chip. Um but today we’re using these regular ones cuz they got that cuz they’re special. They got that umami seasoning. This is shupan. Uh so Japanese kind of soft milk white bread, which uh is my favorite kind of sandwich bread. Um, so the last sort of little little trick here that maybe you didn’t do in your high school cafeteria or your middle school cafeteria is something that my my friend um Allison Allison Robachelli who um uh is a chef and a writer and a wonderful human being uh she told me that the best way to make a tuna sandwich is to not just put the potato chips on the sandwich, but to put the potato chips actually in the tuna salad itself. So I do kind of both. If we’re going mayo, we’re going we’re going mayo. Mayo on every piece of bread. Give it a little spread. You know, obviously when you’re tasting your tuna salad, what you really want to be tasting for is uh sort of salt level, pepper level, um acidity, you know, just sort of the balance of flavors and and adding whatever you feel it might be missing. Um we don’t need to go greenage on these, but I’m going to do some some of this uh butter lettuce here. We’ll give the We’ll give the salad a little a little bib or the the sandwich a little bib. All right. And All right. Salad number one. We’re going tortillas. Salad number two. Oh, that’s really satisfying. Wow. They look like dog food bowls. They do. People ask on my comments like, “Are you using dog food bowls?” Like I don’t Maybe they weren’t sold as dog food bowls, but but also like it’s not like dog food bowls, right? They’re just stainless steel bowls. All right. So, we mix that together. They only become dog food bowls after a dog eats food out of it. Oh, look. I’m just thinking of it. My dog has eaten food out of these bowls. So, yes, they are they are dog food bowls. All right, let’s let’s pile it on. I often feel like, you know, tuna salad can generally take more more olive oil than you think it can if you kind of mix it up well. Probably could have gone even with a full 1/4 cup. All right. All right. And four. Do you want to do Do you want to squish one? Yeah. If it’s going to sound like it did earlier, I sure do. All right. Which What do you want to do? Do you want to do the tortillas or the chips? I want to do the chips. They sounded nice. All right. Let’s uh let’s get the tortillas on here. Nice nice pile of them. Oh, you know what I love also? It’s Fritos. Fritos are great on a sandwich. That’s my favorite chip. Three ingredients and two of them are corn derived. My dog’s feet smell like Fritos. And the third one is toes, which is the part of the dog that smells like Fritos. I think you could go more. Okay. Did you just come back from um You just came back from like a Bobby Fle burger place, right? Yeah. Where they do this? Yeah. Yeah. All right. Okay. Ready? Oh, yeah. Sounds like a chiropractor. Let me uh let me cut these into triangles. Triangles. Yeah, triangles always taste better. So, these are sandwiches that are best made like you don’t want to pre-make that tuna salad and let it sit around because the chips will sort of start to get soft. You want them to stay crunchy in there. So, we should go and like you shouldn’t do something like pause so that you can take thumbnail photos before eating your sandwich. I like tuna. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. How’s this one? Oh, mommy. Do you know what the difference between a a tuna and a piano is? What? You can you can tune a piano, but you can’t tune a fish. It’s why he’s a chef, folks. Wait, no. It’s the difference between a fish and a piano. No, this is why he’s a chef, folks. tuna crunch sandwiches. Um, you can find the full article and recipe uh on ny timescooking.com. Uh, and you can get the full video right where you just watched it, right here. All right, guys, gals, nonbinary pals. See you later.