Thursday, January 26, 2012

Party favourites: Seared tuna with asparagus and carrots

Seared tuna

A little photoessay on a dish I learnt to make at Cookyn Inc...seared tuna, garnished with ribbons of asparagus and carrots.

First but some tuna...shown here, two slabs of sashimi grade maguro.

It is important to use sashimi grade tuna, even though we are going to sear the tuna, as you shall see later, only a small outer surface of the tuna gets cooked.

Slice the asparagus longitudinally using a potato peeler:

Next, apply a coat of cooking oil. Peanut oil or vegetable oil is fine. Lard is also ok. Olive oil is not so good as it has a low smoke point.

Season the tuna with pepper, and a little salt. Careful with the salt. Too much will cause the moisture to wick out of your tuna, and cause a dry tasting fish.

Then with a standard blow torch, sear the outside of the tuna, turning over so that all 4 sides gets seared...get the one used in kitchens for making creme brule or searing meat.

After searing, the block of tuna looks like this

Then plate and serve

Enjoy.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Peter,

This looks very nice. Did you treat the vegetables at all or are they raw? Also, what is the green sauce?

Michael.

His Food Blog said...

The vegetables looked raw. Probably peeled and shocked in iced water to retain crunchiness and vibrant colours.

The green sauce my guess is basil oil - basil, olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic and chilli padi (optional).

:D~

Scenes in Singapore life said...

HFB is absolutely correct. The veges are raw dipped in ice cold water till ready to serve to maintain crispness. And he is correct on the sauce as well.