Tuna steak epic fail

Ok, not all meals turn out amazing on the egg, so here's an epic fail from last night. I think it's better to learn from one's failures than successes, so I present to you... how NOT to do tuna steaks. But before everyone gets their hackles up, I have to say, it was NOT the egg's fault. BTW, it's a long read, so please pack a lunch before you go on. That said, here goes:

I bought some frozen tuna steaks from Costco. Normally, I'm not a big tuna fan, but tuna is really low in fat, and the DW is complaining about all the tasty, but incredibly fatty cooks coming off the Egg on a nightly basis.

Now, I've never cooked tuna steaks before. Being from Northern Ontario, I can fillet anything caught in a lake, from a 2 ounce rock bass to a 18 pound trout, and cook it full of awesome, but give me big seafood, and I'm completely lost. So I pored over my many BBQ cookbooks, and most of the tuna steak recipies were a mile long using ingredients no normal Canadian household would ever have. Capers? Quail eggs? Then I went to WiseOne's collection of forum recipes, and "Greta's tuna" stuck out. It had easy ingredients, cooked up in 45 minutes, and was supposedly tasty. I made some substitutions and minor changes, though, which all turned out to be, ummm... ill-advised. I was hoping this would be a nice gourmet meal for the DW, and a light one, versus the meat-heavy Egged monster meals we have been having as of late. So let's start.

Mistake #1) Supposedly, you treat tuna steaks like you would treat any steak, so I'm told. But tuna has no fat. A fatless steak would be like a flank, and needs marinating in a citrus or wine vinegar or milk or papaya or whatever overnight to make it tasty. Using this logic, I extended the marinating time of the tuna steaks from 30 minutes, to overnight in the juice of 1 lime, cracked pepper and EVOO. What I didn't know is that tuna sucks up lime juice like a sponge and extended acidic marination actually toughens the fish. There is no collagen to break down in tuna. The meat just shrinks. Now I know.

Mistake #2) The recipe calls for a toasted, sliced baguette. The DW doesn't eat white bread (nor do I) so I bought a whole wheat baguette. Unfortunately, ww baguettes are way too chewy as a base for this. Toasted, they are like rocks on the edges. Chewy rocks.

Mistake #3) Greta's recipe calls for a ripe mango. I used a mango. I, being a man, don't know the difference between a ripe mango and a mango in the g*ddamn fridge. So, I peel one, and I get about an ounce of soft slippery mango for my efforts, the rest being locked into some sort of hard fiberous matrix that takes up about 80% of its total mass. I picked at it for a bit and gave up. What a stupid fruit! The mango slivers I could get went into the blender with some red wine vinegar and the juice from yet another lime, again, as the recipe demands. I'm suspicious at this point, but maybe the tuna steaks have some sort of special magic in them that will make this sauce taste perfect. I soldier on.

Mistake #4) The recipe calls for Egg-roasted vidalia onion. Well, I forgot to get a g*ddamn vidalia onion in the store when I went to get the baguette, so I just cut up a regular onion. Onions are onions, WTF, fine. Away we go.

Mistake #5) Some tuna steak recipes say to make the fire nuclear. Some do a slow roast at 400. I decided to T-rex them, because that's the way I like my steaks, these were "steaks", and I like steaks, so what the hell. Nobody tells you what the internal temperature should be for tuna to pull, but the steaks were about an inch thick, I figured a 90 second-per-side sear and a 5 minute 400 dwell should do it for medium rare.

Sooo.. the cold mango sauce is blended, and it looks pretty barfy - a thin reddish orange lumpy concoction, and it tastes like vinegary lime. Done! On to the next step. I try to char the tuna, but the tuna doesn't actually char, it just sort of turns a grey colour with black grid lines. Tongs don't work - the steaks fall apart (agh!) so I run in the house for a spatula, which takes too long at 600 degrees. I flip. I pull them after flipping, and get ready for a roast, but the fallen-apart tuna looks pretty well done. Grey with a tiny bit of pink in the middle on one broken off chunk. I was supposed to put the onions on for the roast, but I can't roast them now, so the hell with low fat at this point, I sauté the onions in butter. I slice up the tuna. It's a bit flaky on the sides, the centre is cool, the outside is grey. I fan the slices on the toasted bread, add the sautéed onions, pour over the cold mango liquid, top with a sprig of italian parsley, and it doesn't look too bad. Almost professional. I shut down the Egg and proudly lay out my gourmet lime tuna mango toast. And smile.

The DW and I sit down and crack open a decent bottle of chardonnay (Inniskillin 2005, ontario wine, natch), which I guessed might go with tuna steaks, but in fact, maybe a zin or a fruity riesling would have been a better choice with the lime. You rolls your dices and you takes your chances. Sometimes you gotta roll the hard six.

Well, the DW's first bite was telling. The DW avoided the sauce like it was radioactive, and then tried to cut into a bit of the chewy baguette toast which was uncovered. No good, the knife slipped hard with the pressure, and the toast went skating off her plate, tuna and all, onto the floor. The pets lunged. What happened next went very fast.

First, a word about my pets. Both are rescue animals from the Winnipeg Humane Society. The dog is a 70 pound german shepherd-collie mix, and the cat is a weird mishmash of colours which I now recognize as a perfect camoflage for gravel driveways. These animals have never met food they didn't like, mostly because they spent time starving on the street previous to joining our family in Ottawa. To show their appreciation, I can literally feed my cat anything and she has never turned it down. No cat food has ever been refused. She even eats the dog's food in the brazen way Winnipeg street cats are. This cat will eat lime jello. In the same vein, the dog would eat broken-up drywall if I put ketchup on it. Normally, they are never allowed to eat food from the table, but with two four-year old boys, they are trained to rapidly pick up spilled juice and dropped french fries. Matter of fact, it's their job, one of they few jobs they have, beyond warming our feet in bed and barking at salesmen at the door. Anyway, back to our story.

The dog and cat bolted for the food at the same time, nails skittering, fighting for purchase on the Pergo. Being smaller and younger, the cat got there first while the dog's legs were still pinwheeling around, cartoonlike, in that strange way dogs have on laminate floors. Strangely, the cat paused on arrival. She took a tentative sniff, and actually backed off. The dog seized on the cat's foolish hesitation, and wolfed down the tuna. She only made it halfway through her swallow, paused, and made a thick coughing sound, followed by a quick retch which slid the food out of her mouth and back on the floor. This was not a good sign. The pets then stared at the half-chewed food, confused, as if to determine what exactly happened there, and which part of this table bounty was actually edible. The cat tried the tuna again, and gave up, meowing in despair. The dog just looked up at me with sad eyes. This pissed me off, "there's nothing wrong with that" I growled, and I ordered her to eat it by forcefully pointing at the sad remnants of what I thought was going to be a fancy gourmet meal. She very gently took just the toast in her mouth, like it was an injured puppy, over to her little carpet, and set it down again. That's where it stayed.

At this point, I decided to try the food. I took a big cut, sawed through the toasted baguette (being careful not to poke the toast off my plate with the effort), swirled it in the cold sauce, and placed the assembly in my mouth. Initially, it wasn't that bad on first chew. It was cold, which wasn't bad per se, sort of like gespacho, and then the second taste came rolling in, like a freight train. It was the limes. The sour, round tones of the lime combined with the acid bite of the vinegar was like licking a 9 volt battery, only slower and with a grey fishy taste. Urgh, I actually gagged, but I swallowed, rinsing the pure acrid nastiness down with a mouthful of good chardonnay, which set off another chain reaction of awful in my mouth, as oaky and limey and fishy and vinegary should never be together in the same place, ever. My wife looked at me balefully. She said it tasted a bit lime-ey, but good try, honey. Was the mango ripe, she asked? She shot me a look like I was just a stupid guy, which I am, but still, I shrugged, which is always a mistake. "You should always use ripe mangoes" she chided. "Mangoes are expensive". "Was it the mango in the fridge? That wasn't a ripe mango. Did you use all the mango?" And on and on, rapid fire questions, with me shrugging for each answer, all dealing with mangoes, while I tried to chew and swallow the unholy, limey mess. I couldn't actually admit it was bad, - only that it had some rough edges, and it needed improvement, and no, honey, I'll eat what you have. Mmmmm. It's a mixture of stupid pride and the simple fact that we never waste food in our house. And my boys were watching - if I didn't finish my food, all the my yelling at them to finish their food every meal, every day, would all be for naught. They watched closely, suspicious, I yummed at them, and ate it all. Daddy finishes his food, he even eats mommy's food, you eat your food, your fries and butter peas, go ahead, eat.

My wife slipped away from the table, made tea and ate the rest of the untoasted bread. I ate all the limey tuna, save for some on the cutting board which I put into the fridge for the pets. Because, so help me, they are going to eat that fish too.

I'd like to say "it wasn't that bad", but it was, and even my Egg reality distortion field didn't work. But I still have another four frozen tuna steaks in the freezer, and I'll try again. I won't try Greta's recipe idea, but there are other ways to do this. I guess the take-home message is that although not all your meals will make Emeril Legasse cry at your genius, one must never be afraid to try new things. Also, another lesson is not to follow a recipe blindly either - use your taste buds. Learn by failing, true, but learning by tasting is better...

-SJ.