Vietnamese Seared Tuna Salad with Tomatillo Fish Sauce Dressing, Gỏi Cá Ngừ, at Camp
It’s easy to cook and eat well when you're on weekend trip. You just go to your local grocery store and grab all the ingredients you need to cook up whatever you desire. Food storage space isn’t that much of a premium since most of it is only dedicated to 2-3 days of meals.
But, when you’re on much longer trips that last a week, or longer, good meals start to become sparse as you concentrate more on how long your fresh produce can last, or how long you can go without going to a grocery store for a resupply. On top of all that, you can’t always find what everything you’re used to getting in your usual big city grocery stores. Small towns have a limited supply of what they can offer. The produce usually reflects what’s local and in season. Improvisation becomes a huge part of your day-to-day cooking experience. You have to cook with what you can get, and with what you have.
On our month long trip in Baja, improv was key. We couldn’t depend on our usual “things to buy” whenever we’re in the States. We were at the whim of what the markets had to offer. We lived the millennial dream: eating locally and seasonally. We travel with a fairly wide selection of spices and seasoning so we can whip together basically anything we want. We can throw together American, Indian, Korean, Mexican, or Vietnamese pretty easily.
This dish isn’t something we normally make at home. We’ve actually never seen it made in any restaurant. It was cobbled together with what we had, from what the small town market in Baja had to offer, and our forever craving of Vietnamese food.
The salad was inspired a traditional Vietnamese chicken salad, goi ga, then fused with our love of grill seafood from the streets of Vietnam.
Tuna steaks were easy to come across around the Baja peninsula. Local fishermen would drive around campsites offering their morning’s catch, or if you’re in a bigger town, the bigger grocery stores would have them.
The green tomatillo sauce was inspired from our travels in Vietnam. We had this ubiquitous sauce anytime there was charcoal grilled seafood cooked at the thousands of street corners or alleyways around the cosmopolitan city of Ho Chi Minh.
Seafood and the green nước chấm, or fish sauce, was a no brainer with the ease of access to tomatillos around Baja.
And thus, this dish was born.
INGREDIENTS
SERVES 4-6
Prep time: 20 minutes
Cook time: 10 minutes
Tomatillo Fish Sauce:
4-5 medium tomatillos
1 serrano chili, or 1 jalapeño
1 medium shallot
a small handful of mint
a handful of cilantro
3 tbsp fish sauce
3 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp toasted sesame oil (optional)
Gỏi, salad:
3 tuna steaks
1 10oz bag of pre-shredded cole slaw cabbage
1 10oz bag of pre-shredded cole slaw red cabbage (for color)
1 10oz pre-jullienned, or matchstick carrots
1/4 of a red onion
a handful of mint
a small handful of perilla leaves (optional)
a handful of cilantro
1/2 cup of roasted peanuts (unsalted)
fried shallots, or fried onion
1 pack of sesame rice paper, bánh tráng me, or tostadas
salt
pepper
DIRECTIONS
If you have a portable food processor, making the sauce is a very easy process. A smoothie maker like a Magic Bullet will do just fine. If not, you can use a mortar and pestle, or chop everything up incredibly fine by hand then mixing it all up in a bowl. To make the the sauce, remove the wrapping from the tomatillos and give them a quick rinse. Place the tomatillos at the bottom of the food processor, then a roughly chopped shallot, roughly chopped serrano chili, the mint and cilantro, fish sauce, and sugar. Blend until you get a nice salsa verde consistency. Taste to adjust any seasoning. The salt, sweetness, and acidity should be perfectly balanced. No flavor should over power each other.
Set aside on a bowl and let the flavors mingle.
Season each side of your tuna steaks with salt and pepper. Sear the tuna on a pan for about a minute, or a minute and a half, on each side. You’re looking for a medium rare, or medium cooking temperature in the middle. Let cool before slicing into cubes then set it aside.
In a large salad bowl, combine the cabbage, red cabbage, julienne’d carrots, julienne’d red onion, mint, cilantro, perilla leaves, and peanuts. Mix to evenly distribute all the ingredients. Next, toss in the seared and cubed tuna steaks. You want to be pretty light on your mixing as the tuna can be a little fragile from being cooked. Add in 3-4 table spoons of the tomatillo fish sauce and toss to evenly incorporate the dressing. Top with fried shallots.
Enjoy it with sesame rice paper, or tostadas.
Nestled amidst the lush plateaus and misty mountains of Vietnam, the charming city of Dalat unveils a tapestry of beauty that captivates the senses. Known as the "City of Eternal Spring," Dalat is a hidden gem beloved by travelers seeking tranquility, breathtaking landscapes, and, of course, gastronomic wonders. During the French occupation of Vietnam, French citizen would often flock to the cooler temperatures of the mountainous region of Dalat to as a get-away from the usual hot and humid climate of the cities and jungle below. This is the reason many buildings look French and have that small French town vibe.