CONSERVED (CANNED) TUNA, two ways

Is this going to be better than any canned tuna you've had?

Well, yah. Three reasons. First, I'm starting with pristinely fresh, sashimi-quality tuna. Any commercially-available tuna of this grade would be sold to restaurants and sushi bars, while the fish packers(canners) get the not-so-nice stuff. I'm canning my fish because there's no way that I could possibly consume it all fresh, and tuna preserved by canning is much better than frozen-and-thawed "fresh tuna wannabe." Second, I'm conserving the tuna in olive oil, not the water or soya oil used in most commercial product. The flavors of olive oil and tuna meld beautifully and improve with age. A jar from two years ago is better than one that's just been canned (which is already very good).

Third, I'm using the Italian method, which involves cooking the tuna before packing it into jars. This means that the fish is really cooked twice, as an additional hour and a half in the pressure cooker will be needed to sterilize. I don't know about commercial canners, but most home canners I know use the "raw pack" method, which is just not as good. The problem with raw-pack is that there is no consideration given to how the fish is cooked, it just gets cooked during the sterilization. Raw fish also has a lot more moisture and this doesn't help to develop a lot of flavor. Some people add garlic or jalapeños to compensate for the lack of taste, but I'm not keen on this.

When I can tuna, I do two "styles"—the loins are usually poached and packed into pint jars. The bellies are smoked and packed into half-pint jars. Tuna bellies, if you don't know, are the prime cut of the fish, highly prized in Japan as the famous toro, and also in Italy as ventresca di tonno. Just a small jar of Italian ventresca will set you back ten euro or more, and it's not half as good as what I make at home.


Poaching the loins requires a large volume of tuna broth, which I made from the bones of the fish I filleted previously. After skinning the loins I trimmed off the dark muscle and split each loin lengthwise into a long flat piece 2-2.5 cm thick and a sort of triangular (in profile) "log." Two loins (split into four pieces) then poached for forty minutes in a large roasting pan set over two burners on the stove. This is one of those poachings where you don't want more than a bubble every few seconds—better yet, the liquid should just be visibly moving in a nervous sort of way, like it wants to bubble but can't quite do it.

The loins should have shrunk noticeably during the cooking. I always allow the fish to cool in the poaching liquid before removing the loins so that I can poach the next batch. Yes, this is a lazy, all-day project. While this is happening you can be working on the smoked ventresca.

I rub the tuna bellies with a 50-50 mixture of kosher salt and brown sugar and let them sit in the fridge for a day before smoking. The general idea here will be to use a backyard barbecue-like thing to hot smoke the fish with indirect heat.

My set-up consists of a kettle-style grill with a tight pile of coals off to one side. A few pre-soaked hickory chips go directly on the coals.

On the grill, a pan of water goes directly over the coals, and the fish is well off to the side—no live coals under the cooking fish. And don't crowd the grill with too much food. Then, the lid went on but just enough to contain the smoke and not in a way that would choke out the coals which need access to lots of air, especially with the wet chips and pan of water inside.

Cooking time depends on a lot of variables. With my set up, the smoke subsides after 15-20 minutes and the second pan water (water added after 20) is almost dried up after 35 and by then the fish is done. There's a lot of fat in tuna bellies, and a pool of fish oil will have accumulated directly below where the fish were cooking. This oil will burn with thick, black, evil smoke if you put some live coals on it. Do this. It's fun! But make sure you have removed the bellies beforehand.

This next part is going to seem seriously geeky, but hell if I care. Packing solid blocks of cooked tuna into pint jars is kind of a challenge, mostly because the mouth of a typical Mason jar is smaller than the jar's belly. You definitely want to put in pieces that are as large as possible, leaving as little space as possible, while "mushing" the tuna into the jar is definitely not good because it breaks up the solid blocks and prevents the oil from penetrating down to the bottom of the jar. My solution:

A long time ago, I spent the better part of a day carving out four pieces of florist's foam that could be fit into a pint jar like a puzzle if you followed the right sequence. I then covered these puzzle pieces with masking tape and numbered them.

Before I did this, fitting blocks of tuna into jars involved a lot of eyeballing and guesswork, which was made more difficult by the funny contours (kinda square, kinda round) in the Mason jar. I usually ended up with a bunch of pieces that didn't really fit anywhere and ended up mushing them haphazardly into the last three or four jars, which I had to label "tuna bits"—too ugly for anything but mixing with mayo.

Now, I just cut the four pieces based on the foam-and-tape models and pack a jar. Repeat. The work goes much quicker, I end up with more good jars (twelve jars of solid to less than one jar of bits this time), and because I'm packing them more effectively with more tuna, I'm using less olive oil than I used to.


Packing the ventresca is easier, because the mouth is the widest part of the half-pint jar and the ventresca pieces are flat. It is important, however to remove all skin, the body cavity membrane, and any loose scales before packing the jars.


Don't try to overpack. It's best to leave a fairly large space between the top of the food and the top of the jar. Then it's just a matter of adding a dose of sea salt to each jar, oil to cover the fish, then sterilizing in a pressure cooker. Pint jars require 90 minutes at pressure for sterilization, according to the website that I consulted. This seems excessive to me, but I do it anyways.

After the 90 minutes plus the time required to cool so that the pressure is relieved and the pot can be opened safely, the vacuum seal should have been made and the contents of the jars should be happily boiling away and they will continue to boil for a while after you remove them from the pot and put them on a counter. If you see that a jar is not bubbling away, this means that the pressure inside the jar is fairly high, and the seal is not as good as it should be. I recommend re-sterilizing such jars, even if the top of the jar doesn't buckle, just to get a good seal.


After all the jars are fully sterilized and cooled, you should remove the rings and give the jars and rings a good washing to remove any oil or fish bits that might be clinging to the outside of the jar or the seal area. Label the jars and screw the rings back on tightly before putting them away in a cool, dry place for at least a couple of months. These jars might be sitting in your pantry for a couple of years or more, depending on how many of them you're putting away and how quickly you consume the tuna.