In today’s “Cooking Off the Cuff” at WashingtonPost.com, I write about a really
delicious tuna dish made in a kind of Sicilian style – including the doneness
of the fish, which is cooked through but still nice and moist. Prepared this
way, the fish stands up beautifully to the very flavorful garnish/sauce of
tomatoes, garlic, olives and herbs.
A week or so later, I had what seemed like a brilliant idea
for dinner using similar ingredients, this time in a pasta dish. But it turned
out to be not so brilliant: I ignored my own advice about using cooked-through
tuna with these strong flavors.
The idea was to make a pasta sauce very much like the
garnish for the tuna dish I wrote about in The Post, then to add, at the table,
diced raw tuna, which I figured would cook a bit in the heat of the linguine.
It looked gorgeous, like little jewels (or maybe diced gummi bears).
But the
little points of blandness among all the higher flavors were almost disgusting.
Dressing raw tuna with big flavors is one thing; putting it in a standalone
environment of equally big flavors is quite another. An interesting lesson: Next time
I’ll give the diced tuna a quick sauté, then add it to the sauce.
One successful thing about that dish (which was lovely apart
from the tuna) was that I "filleted" the tomatoes beforehand and
cooked the goo and seeds with herbs, garlic and lots of oil, then pressed this
through a strainer and added it to the sauce when the time came.
Delicious – I could
have dressed pasta with this on its own or spooned it onto grilled bread. It
reminded me of a lobster sauce base but without the lobster, if you see what I
mean: viscous, concentrated, flavorsome.
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