January 22nd - Pasta with Tuna, Capers and Lemon

January 22nd – Pasta with Tuna and Capers

One thing about keeping a food diary like this is that you start to notice certain trends in what you cook. I tend to think that I cook a lot of Mediterranean influenced foods, but of late it seems that I don’t really cook much of it. I’m starting to notice that a lot of my cooking is cyclical. I tend to work certain things in for a few weeks, and then rotate them out for something else that’s catching my interest at the time. I realize I haven’t cooked any pasta in probably more than a month, and for a while it was something that I cooked at least a couple of times a week.

Most of the pastas I do are pretty quick and most don’t require a sauce that takes hours to cook. I like a lot of the Sunday Ragu type of sauces, but don’t make them much. Most of what I do tends to be things that I can sauté in a pan by the time that the pasta cooks, which means something that cooks in less than 20 minutes including prep.

There are actually a fair amount of tuna sauces in traditional Italian cooking. Giuliano Bugialli mentions some in his Fine Art of Italian Cooking but most of those are actually sauces with tuna and tomatoes. One of the dishes I used to make frequently is tuna, capers, lemon juice, olive oil and sometimes olives. Contrary to traditional Italian rules, I also will sprinkle some cheese on it. I normally use canned (actually pouched) tuna for this. Now before you dismiss this as something akin to a 1960’s casserole, you need to realize that cooks throughout Italy and Spain use a fair amount of canned tuna. Much of it is high quality tuna that’s canned with very good olive oil. (Anya von Bremzen talks about this in her excellent book The New Spanish Table.) Tuna canned with oil went out of favor in the US several years ago (even though it’s still available), but most of that (all of that?) didn’t use olive oil. My wife had seen a Cook’s Illustrated tasting a few years ago where they recommended some of the pouched tuna as opposed to canned. We tried it several years ago and agreed and generally keep some of it around for quick meals.

While the water came to a boil and the pasta cooked, I sautéed a little bit of garlic in olive oil on very low heat. I was trying to infuse the oil and wanted to make sure that the garlic didn’t burn. Right before the pasta was done, I added some capers and basil to the pan, and then added the juice of two small lemons. I mixed it together to make an emulsion and then added the tuna. I drained the pasta (keeping some pasta water in case I need to add it to the sauce) and added it to the pan and tossed it together before plating it and adding a little bit of Grana Padano.

It had a little more lemon than I had anticipated, but it wasn’t too much and actually made the dish taste very bright and fresh. I went for a pint of the Belgian golden ale again, because I knew that the citrus notes of the beer would work with the dish and that the dryness of the beer would offset some of the brininess of the capers. The two almost seemed made for each other and went as well as any wine that I could have chosen.