You Can Tune a Piano but You Can’t Tuna Sandwich

I grew up eating “tunafish” sandwiches. A tunafish sandwich, as I experienced it when I was younger, was a very simple tuna salad without the crunchy bits, and with Miracle Whip instead of mayonnaise. I did not know these ingredients at the time. I just knew that I asked for a tunafish sandwich and that’s what I got.

(Mom says sometimes she also made them with hard boiled eggs and mustard mixed in. She likely did not bring this to my attention at the time)

I ate these tunafish sandwiches frequently as a child, until one time I was staying with my grandparents. I asked for a tunafish sandwich, but could not articulate what that entailed–My grandmother, who was a terrible cook, made me a sandwich of plain tuna scooped straight out of the can onto white bread when I asked for a tunafish sandwich but could not explain what that meant.

I never asked for a tunafish sandwich again.

Here we are, decades later, and the old standby tunafish sandwich is still not a regular part of my repertoire. Sure, we’ve covered a few in the past 5 years, most notably the classic tuna sub from J.P. Graziano, which features plenty of the crunchy bits mixed in with some imported Italian tinned tuna along with zero Miracle Whip.

Back in 2016, I wrote a goof-off piece on the Maltese Ftira–a sandwich featuring tuna, tomato paste, olive oil, and vegetables on a wide round bread roll also called a ftira–from the point of view of Sydney Greenstreet’s portrayal of Kasper Gutman in the classic noir The Maltese Falcon. It was a silly piece but a serious sandwich.

Then at Christmas 2017, I made Pan Bagnat, a salade niçoise stuffed into a bread roll, with tuna, bell peppers, scallions, cucumber, tomato, olives, anchovies, and boiled eggs dressed with a combination of olive oil and dijon mustard.

Speaking of Pan Bagnat, just the other day I saw a post on Reddit describing a Tunisian sandwich that appeared to be a direct descendent of this Nicean treat. Since Tunisia was a French colony from 1881 to 1956, it probably is. The sandwich was called Casse-croûte Tunisien. Casse-croûte is a French phrase meaning a snack between meals (or a greasy-spoon type restaurant), but I’m afraid that my version of the sandwich was quite a bit more than a snack.

I reviewed online recipes for the sandwich and found a few that were reposted from site to site, each with its own interesting features. The Saveur recipe, which starts with a homemade tomato sauce. The recipe from Our Tunisian Table, which adds French fried potatoes. This Good Food recipe, which starts with hummus. I combined them all, building the sandwich on this baguette, split most of the way through, but with a hinge left, to help keep the numerous ingredients contained.

I made the tomato sauce recommended by Saveur, but added some North African harissa, a spicy sauce made with roasted chilis, tomatoes, and herbs.

I began by spreading both the harissa-spiced tomato sauce and some hummus on opposite faces of the split baguette.

Next, I added thin-sliced cucumbers and diced tomatoes to the hummus side, while scattering homemade (air-fried) French fries and capers on the tomato sauce side.

For the tuna, I used a too-damn-expensive jar of Italian yellowfin tuna, $13 at my local Italian deli.

I drained some but not all of the olive oil from the jar, flaked the tuna with a fork, and spread it as evenly as I could across the entire baguette.

Atop the tuna went sliced black olives and quartered boiled eggs.

This was a daunting sandwich. It had depth. It had length. It had forced perspective.

I carefully closed the sandwich, nearly losing a few pieces of egg in the process, and wrapped it in butcher’s paper to eat some then, some later.

Ian, who doesn’t care for crunch bits in sandwiches, did not join Mindy and I in sampling this tuna sandwich. We quite enjoyed it though. The tuna was of noticeably higher quality than most, and it was reminiscent of the Pan bagnat, though with a savory and spicy boost from the harissa and tomato sauce. I had made pickled onions to go with the sandwich but forgot to put them into it, so I served them on the side along with some more harissa. It was a fantastic lunch, and the sandwich leftovers kept me in lunches for days.

My own limits for adding crunchy bits to tuna salad have been stretched well past their breaking point by now, many of my childhood aversions long conquered. (Let’s not talk about canned green beans though) As recently as last month, I made a crustless tramezzino with tuna, simply dressed with parsley and capers, mayonnaise, tomato, and arugula.

Clearly, there are many forms to the tuna sandwich, or tunafish sandwich as younger me would have put it. Many, if not most, tuna sandwiches you’ll order in the US are as simple as the tuna sandwich from the Corner Bakery next door to my office.

Corner Bakery’s tuna sandwich comes on untoasted “Harvest Bread,” a dark molassesy seeded bread that’s a bit on the sweet/dense/moist side for my taste but not terrible.

Commodity tuna is mixed with red onion, celery, and mayonnaise, piled into a glob in the center of the bread, slapped together with some tomato, lettuce, and another slice of bread, then sliced in half diagonally and slapped haphazardly into a plastic clamshell.

I wouldn’t have touched this tunafish sandwich when I was a kid–not only would the tomato and lettuce have been a clear indicator that this was a “grown-up” sandwich, the onions and celery in the tuna salad would have had me accusing my mother of trying to poison me. Now, though, it’s fine, a mostly inoffensive lunch that I probably won’t order again any time soon but didn’t hate when I ate it a few weeks ago.

The other type of tuna sandwich I ate as a child–and this one was not referred to as a tunafish sandwich, that descriptor was reserved for the previously described barebones tuna salad–was the tuna melt. The tuna melts of my childhood were served open-faced, on toasted wheat bread, with American cheese on top that was melted under the broiler.

(Mom would like to issue another correction here. She says her tuna melts were made in hamburger buns with American or Cheddar cheese, wrapped up in foil and baked. Memory is a weird place and Mom is a better cook than I often give her credit for but I was a picky little kid)

I ordered a tuna melt this month at Exchequer, a pub in downtown Chicago. They did not serve it open face, or on a hamburger bun for that matter.

The tuna melt at Exchequer consisted of some decent bread, toasted hard, with a great thick layer of tuna salad on top, tomatoes, then melted American cheese. The tuna salad contains very finely diced onion and celery.

Now I’ve heard some folks say that they do not care for the idea of hot tuna salad. Something about the combination of tuna and mayonnaise, hot, gives these folks the shudders. Well they needn’t worry about Exchequer’s tuna melt–this thick mass of tuna salad was somehow still quite cold in the center, despite the hot toasted bread and melted cheese.

Portillo’s, a local chain offering such Chicago-style fare as Italian Beef sandwiches and Chicago-style “dragged through the garden” hot dogs, also offers a tuna sandwich. Nick Kindelsperger, stalwart of the Chicago food-writing scene, called it one of his favorite dishes at Portillo’s back in his Serious Eats days.

Is there such a thing as a Chicago-style tuna sandwich?

The tuna sandwich at Portillo’s consists of a “grilled yellow-fin tuna filet” according to their menu, along with tartar sauce, lettuce, tomato, and onion, on a hamburger bun.

I’ve never really liked tartar sauce. In this particular instance, it just kind of tasted like mayonnaise to me. In fact the whole sandwich basically tasted like mayonnaise and tomato in a bun, much like many fast food grilled chicken sandwiches do. The tuna was in a solid piece rather than flaked out of a can, but it didn’t taste any better or worse. It mostly just seemed dryer. The nice thing about eating at a Portillo’s though is that if your primary sandwich doesn’t work out, you can just go back through the line and get a hot dog or a beef sandwich and be fairly sure to be satisfied.

The most surprising tuna sandwich I ate in a restaurant this month was at Frontier in West Town, a space resembling a cross between a sports bar and a hunting lodge offering a regular menu in addition to their “Whole Animal Experience,” a tempting but expensive order-ahead service for parties of a dozen or so. Their Ahi tuna sandwich consists of seared tuna, still quite rare on the inside, sliced thin and served on toasted sourdough with spicy fried shallots, some microgreens they call “sprouts” that look like cress, and wasabi mayonnaise.

This sandwich may not be an unusual one in the world of tuna sandwiches. There may be a dozen other places in town serving sandwiches nearly indistinguishable from it. It was a revelation to me this month though. I could get a tuna sandwich where the tuna wasn’t cooked all the way through? Madness! Genius!

The spicy fried shallots were very much like the kind of fried onions from a can that are served on top of a green bean casserole, but crisper and spicier. The wasabi mayonnaise gave a bit of that chemical burn spice that a good wasabi does. The tuna was lightly seared but overall mostly had the texture of good raw tuna, like you’d get at a sushi restaurant. In fact, the overall impression of the sandwich was much like one of those stunt sushi rolls that true connoisseurs turn up their noses at–a spicy crunchy tuna roll, with the bits of fried tempura batter–but I mean this in a good way, a very good way.

The sandwich inspired me. Not to go out and find more seared or raw tuna sandwiches, but to make my own. I bought this hunk of good tuna at Lawrence Fish Market, a good but cheap cash-only sushi and sashimi vendor on the north side of Chicago.

I wasn’t winging it. I had a plan. My plan was to make a raw tuna laab, a Thai-style meat salad dressed with chili peppers, shallots, coriander, mint leaves, lime juice, and fish sauce, topped with khao khua, raw rice toasted until slightly browned and then ground to a crunchy coarse powder.

For the base of the sandwich, I elected to use the excellent Vietnamese demibaguettes sold by Nhu Lan bakery, in which they also serve the banh mi that have graced this site from time to time in the past.

Before starting in on the tuna, before even removing it from ice, I prepared the mix-ins for the laab, thin sliced shallots and Thai chilies, chopped cilantro and mint leaves, lime juice and fish sauce.

I sharpened my sharpest knife, and then sharpened it again. Then I cut the tuna carefully into a pile of half-inch cubes.

I mixed the tuna into the salad ingredients. As the raw fish came into contact with the acidic lime juice, it began to change, ever so slightly, the edges just barely cooking in a chemical reaction, much like with ceviche.

To the banh mi bread roll I added some kewpie-style mayonnaise, yolkier than American store-bought mayo, and flavored again with lime juice and fish sauce.

I lined the roll with some red leaf lettuce to protect the bread from the salad’s dressing, and, I’ll be honest, to look pretty.

Into the red leaf lettuce I carefully spooned half of the raw tuna laab, sprinkling the toasted rice powder on top.

The tuna looks a bit lost in all that bread and lettuce. But this is a powerful sandwich filling. Laab can be as fiery as any Thai dish, though I had used some restraint when adding the Thai chilis, so that this was hot but not painful. The combination of fish sauce and lime juice though is a potent one, the sour and salty flavors being two of the pillars of Thai cuisine. The bright and sweet flavors of the herbs also stood out, with the delightful firm but soft texture of the raw tuna contrasting with the crisp and light crust of the bread.

The toasted rice was there but lost–I caught a bit of its crunch from time to time, but should have been heavier-handed in applying it. Otherwise, this was a perfect sandwich, with the texture of ceviche and the flavors of laab in the form factor of a banh mi.

I can’t say I’ll never have a sandwich made from flaky cooked tuna out of a can again. In fact I currently have an urge to try to recreate the tuna melts of my childhood, both those described to me by Mom and the imaginary ones my memory presents to me. But I would eat this raw tuna sandwich every chance I got if I found it on a menu somewhere. I may have to open my own sandwich shop just to make it.

So tell me about your tuna sandwiches, readers! What am I missing out on?