Curly lettuce with two cans of tuna, hard-boiled egg, cherry tomatoes, avocado and red onion, dressed with a vinaigrette of oil, vinegar, honey and mustard mayonnaise.
Cold eggs
The ingredient list asked for four warm hard-boiled eggs, and warm is exactly what they should not be.
This is a cold salad built on curly lettuce. A warm egg laid on lettuce wilts it in the time it takes to carry the bowl to the table, and the leaves go from crisp to limp for no reason at all.
Boil them ahead, cool them under running water, and slice them cold. The cooling also makes them far easier to slice cleanly, because a warm yolk crumbles.
Dress it at the table
Everything about this salad is fine until the vinaigrette goes on, and from that moment it has about five minutes.
Fifty grams of vinegar and forty of oil is an aggressive dressing, and curly lettuce is mostly water held in a thin structure. Acid breaks it down fast: a salad dressed in the kitchen and carried out is already softening, and one dressed ten minutes early is soup.
Make the vinaigrette in its own bowl, take both to the table, and pour it over in front of everyone.
The honey is the whole vinaigrette
Oil, vinegar, honey, chopped olives, mustard mayonnaise, parsley and cream. It is a longer list than most dressings and the honey is the piece doing the work.
Twenty grams against fifty of vinegar. Without it the dressing is sharp and flat, all acid and fat with nothing in between. With it there is a middle that carries the mustard and the olives, and nobody reads it as sweet.
The cream is the other unusual one. Fifteen grams softens the whole thing and helps it cling to the leaves rather than running to the bottom of the bowl.
Build it in the bowl
The order in the steps is the order to follow, and the avocado is deliberately last.
Lettuce first, cut into fine strips. Then egg, tomatoes, onion if you want it, and the tuna drained and flaked over. Turn it gently rather than tossing it.
The avocado goes on top rather than through, sliced at the last moment. Mixed in it breaks into paste and browns at every cut surface; laid over the top it stays in pieces and stays green.
More salads
- Ensalada rusa — the mayonnaise one.
- Cabbage salad — holds up longer.
- Egg and potato salad — also cold.
- Avocado sauce — the other use for the avocado.
Tuna Salad FAQ
At the table, right before serving. There are fifty grams of vinegar in this vinaigrette and lettuce collapses within minutes of meeting it.
Cold. The ingredient list used to say warm hard-boiled eggs, which makes no sense in a cold salad: warm egg wilts the lettuce it sits on. Boil them ahead and let them cool.
Mayonnaise with mustard stirred through it, sold ready-made in Colombia and easy to improvise: about three parts mayonnaise to one of mustard.
Because oil, vinegar and mustard on their own are sharp and one-note. Twenty grams of honey gives the dressing a middle without making it sweet.
The components, yes. Cut everything, keep it covered in the fridge, and make the vinaigrette separately. Assemble and dress at the last moment.
Either, drained well. Tuna in oil is richer and the salad already has a fatty dressing, so tuna in water keeps it lighter.
Because mixed through it breaks up and browns. Sliced last and laid over the surface it stays in pieces and keeps its colour.
📖 Recipe
Ingredients
For the salad
- Curly lettuce to taste
- 2 large cans of tuna (or 4 small ones)
- 4 hard-boiled eggs (cooled before they go in)
- 1 cup cherry tomatoes
- 1 avocado
- 1 red onion (optional)
For the vinaigrette
- 40 g oil
- 50 g vinegar
- 20 g honey
- 15 g olives (finely chopped)
- 80 g mustard mayonnaise (mayonnaise with mustard stirred through it)
- 2 grams parsley (finely chopped)
- 15 g cream
Notas
Instructions
For the salad
- Take several lettuce leaves, fold them over and run a sharp knife through them to cut them into fine strips.
- Put the cut lettuce in a bowl.
- Slice the hard-boiled eggs thinly and add them to the bowl. Let them cool first: warm egg wilts the lettuce underneath it.
- Halve the cherry tomatoes, or leave them whole, and add them along with the avocado cut into thin strips.
- If you want the onion, cut it into very thin strips and add it.
- Drain the tuna, add it to the bowl and turn everything over gently.
For the Vinaigrette
- In a bowl, put the oil, the vinegar, the honey, the olives, the mustard mayonnaise, the parsley and the cream, and whisk with a spoon or a hand whisk until it is completely combined.
- Pour it over the salad just before serving.
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