Steven Satterfield, the vegetable shaman, co-owner and executive chef at Miller Union in Atlanta, taught me yet another approach: crumbled canned tuna served over a salad of baby kale and chicory mixed with a shallot vinaigrette, along with shaved radishes, sliced fennel and a handful of olives. Satterfield called it a late-winter salade niçoise, and who am I to disagree? It’s awesome.
But it was Bart van Olphen, a YouTube fish fanatic, entrepreneur and chef whose “The Tinned Fish Cookbook” will be published this spring, who gave me my favorite recipe of the new season: an udon noodle salad with canned tuna in oil, dressed in a sweet-salty vinaigrette of soy, sesame oil, mirin and rice vinegar. Van Olphen calls this dressing wafu, which translates roughly as Japanese-style. I think of the dish as Japanese tuna wiggle. It is as good served cold as hot.
I did make some adjustments to van Olphen’s instructions. To the dressing, for instance, I added a little sweet miso, as much for the texture it added as for its taste. And I increased the amount of wakame, a remarkably flavored seaweed, just because it’s so delicious and I wanted to make a point: It’s not really a garnish but an ingredient, like the peas in a tuna casserole, not the chopped parsley on top.
Which is not to say this salad isn’t garnished. But instead of using a spray of van Olphen’s plain toasted sesame seeds, I substituted a like-size amount of furikake, the Japanese seasoning blend that has a base of sesame seeds and then some mixture of dried bonito, hot peppers, chopped seaweed, sugar, salt and, sometimes, monosodium glutamate. My children call furikake “shake” and use it to anoint their afternoon rice snacks, where it adds a hit of pungent umami to their meal. I shower my Japanese tuna wiggle with it for similar reasons. The result tastes to me of promise, of what’s to come.