Seared Ahi Tuna

I am currently reading reading "The New Optimum Nutrition Bible" by Patrick Holford, which I find quite informative and up-to-date. Apparently it is one of the standard textbooks for nutritionists. The general advice from the book is to reduce meat intake, and eat more vegetable based protein instead. Additionally, it is recommended to eat omega 3&6 rich fish twice a week. Obviously the targeted audience is from the west, where seafood is far less popular and tends to be more expensive. I remember the days when I used to eat seafood every day, and twice a week seems like a punishment. However reflecting back on the past ten years living in the US, my regular seafood consumption dropped to below once a month! And most of them come from Sushi restaurants! Recently I am back on a seafood/vegetable rich diet, and I feel so much better. It turns out that it is far more affordable than I expected. One example is our recent dinner of Ahi tuna.

We were lucky to catch a promotion at our grocery store and purchased a whole pound of wild caught Ahi tuna steaks (officially called yellowfin, note: several years ago, an NYTimes article pointed out that the mercury level in bluefin tuna was alarmingly high, compared to the yellowfin and albacore).

I have had multiple experience of going to a restaurant and found out the Ahi tuna on their menu was not available at the time of ordering. Now I can finally just make my own!



First, you can make a very fragrant sauce (adapted from Simply Recipes) consisting 1 tablespoon of sesame oil, 2 tablespoon of soy sauce, some grated ginger, two cloves of pressed garlic, a dash of lime juice, half of a chopped up scallion, and about a tablespoon of cooking wine. It smelled soooo good.

Then you put the tuna steaks in and marinate in the fridge. The tuna was so meaty, had I not been concerned about bacteria, I would have just eaten it raw! D was working late that night, and did not come home till 8:00 p.m. I kept messaging him to come home simply because I was getting very hungry while smelling the marinade.

After 3 hours, it was finally time to cook. On medium heat, sear each side for 90 seconds, and slice into 1/3 inch pieces. We served it with some wine braised vegetables and left over barley. The nutritional analysis shows that the fish part of our dish came to about 250 calories per person. Compared to spending 17 dollars in a restaurant, it cost us less than half. We even had more leftover for lunch the next day. It was very very tasty!