I was in a canning mood recently, and found a local veggie stand that had a canner's special for 200 ears of sweet corn for $38. I decided I'd try my hand at canning corn this year, and thought that sounded like a heck of a deal. Of course I had absolutely zero concept of how much 200 ears of corn actually looks like in real life until I started counting them out into feed sacks. Holy cow!
These guys were happy for the excess corn, husks and all!
We have wonderful neighbors, and I called them up to ask if they would like to take some of the mountain of corn off my hands. They eagerly agreed, and while we were loading up their wagon with ears and chatting, they asked if we like tuna. Apparently they have a friend who loves going tuna fishing, but doesn't really like eating the fish, so sells them for $20 per fish to pay for gas for the boat. We said we'd take five. (As with the corn, I had no earthly concept of what that would look like in real life.)
Turns out, tuna are really quite large fish. We got them on Friday, the same day they'd been caught.
They were each around 20 lbs!
It was getting a little late in the evening, so we decided to fillet them in the kitchen, since it was going to be getting dark soon. (Bad, bad idea... I'm still scraping scales off of various kitchen surfaces!) I tucked right into the first one and had James momentarily convinced I was an old pro at it, until I had to stop and think about what came next on all the YouTube videos I'd snuck off and watched while James was loading the fish up. I was forced to own up to the fact I'd never even SEEN a tuna before.
After watching me do the first, James was eager to get his hands slimy.
Tuna have really strange skin compared to all the salmon etc. that I'm used to. It's almost like a thin shell underneath the skin, which you slice through and peel off of the fish. James was better at that part than I was, it takes a good bit of muscle to strip it off!
Unlike other fish I've done, with tuna, you actually cut loin sections out of the fish, rather than slicing them up the belly like I'm used to doing with salmon.
Here is the first loin section removed from the fish. Each are sort of triangular shaped, and as you can see on the inside of the fish, they have a dark red color to the innermost meat. From what I understand, this part has a higher concentration of myoglobin or blood, and is discarded due to its taste.
Here are the four loins you get from each fish. Not the prettiest fillet job, but hey we're new at this.
Each fish resulted in a good 10 lbs of meat! I guess getting 50% from the whole weight is pretty standard.
This is a (blurry) picture of what the fish looks like after you skin it and cut out the loins.
Since there was a good bit of meat left on the skeleton, we decided to keep them and throw them out to the chickens for a treat. Bayou wasn't quite sure what to do with this new smell.
We decided to freeze most of it, but chose to smoke 3/4 of one fish and have the other 1/4th as grilled fillets for dinner. For the brine we did a real simple 50/50 mix of brown sugar and salt, and let them brine for a couple of hours. Since the tuna is so much softer than salmon, I didn't want to accidentally overdo it on the brine, but next time would leave it in longer.
For grilling, I made a mix of soy sauce, brown sugar, rice vinegar and sesame oil, and let them soak in that for about half an hour. Got the MAK preheating, then grilled them for several minutes on each side.
Served with some grilled corn (of course!) and salad, with a little extra drizzle of sesame oil. I will leave them more pink in the middle next time, but even still they were absolutely succulent!
For the smoked fish, after dinner I gave them a quick rinse, and patted them dry. It was getting pretty late, so I skipped letting them dry and form a pellicle properly, and instead covered them in the fridge to mess with the next day. We were pretty tired after cutting up five big tuna, and I knew I wouldn't make it till 1am!
The next morning I smoked the fillets for about 2-3 hours (I was canning and didn't keep good track of how long it was.) Just took them off when they hit 140°
Definitely a little different than salmon, but dang that is some good fish. Would definitely take the time to do a 'proper' preparation next time, since these did turn out a tad dry (they have a lot less fat than salmon, so have a tenancy to not be as moist anyway)
We made a dip out of some of the smoked tuna-- 8oz cream cheese, 1/2 a sweet onion, 1/4 cup lemon juice and 1/4 mayonnaise all spun up in the food processor. Turned out dang tasty with some capers!!
As is usual while I'm smoking foods and not sharing, this was the little face watching every move I made.
(Yes, I caved and gave her a little piece of the smoked fish in the end.)
It was great timing, as Smoker Pete was coming to pick up his shiny new grill body from MAK that Monday, so I got to share one of the tuna loins with him! He also sent me home with some of his Dungeness crab, which was phenomenal. I didn't realize his birthday was the day after mine (26th and 27th) so we inadvertently gave each other birthday dinners!
We've since told the neighbors we'll take another 5 if their friends go again-- getting 10 pounds of fresh fresh tuna for $20 was a steal in our books. Between canning and freezing all this good stuff, we are going to have one tasty winter!
It's awesome to have some variety from the usual rabbit and chicken. If we get another batch of tuna I will probably try my hand at canning some-- I hear it is worlds apart from the tinned stuff you get at the supermarket.
And a preview for this coming Thanksgiving.... Baby turkeys!!!!
Should be right about 15-20 lbs for Thanksgiving.
