Tomato Tonnato Recipe
Vitello tonnato (Tunnied Veal) is one of my favorite summer dishes, but I had never thought about other uses for tonnato sauce until I saw a Facebook post by fellow blogger and Tuscanycious honoree Judy Witts Francini. (You definitely shouldn’t miss her fabulous Divina Cucina website.) Judy’s post mentioned she was going to make Tomato Tonnato for dinner—and suddenly the proverbial lightbulb went off. What a great idea, I thought to myself, and why hadn’t I thought of that? It was so very obvious—tomato and tuna are a classic combination—but, as the Italians say, it was like the l’uovo di Colombo, or the “egg of Columbus”—it seems so obvious once you think about it, but you need to have thought about it!
In any event, Tomato Tonnato is the ultimate spur of the moment summer dish. The sauce is basically tunafish and mayonnaise blended together with capers and anchovies, just like the one for vitello tonnato, except that instead of thinning the sauce out with braising liquid, you add fresh lemon juice. After you’ve blended all the ingredients together, you pour the sauce over sliced summer tomatoes, garnish with some parsley and basil for color if you like, and voilà! The whole recipe shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes tops—and once you’ve done it once or twice, more like five minutes. And unlike vitello tonnato, there’s no waiting around. You can and should eat your Tomato Tonnato right away.
Tomato Tonnato makes for a fabulous antipasto, light main course or buffet dish.
Ingredients
Serves 4-6
2-3 medium tomatoes, sliced horizontally
For the tonnato sauce:
1 can of tunafish
250ml/1 cup of mayonnaise, preferably homemade
A spoonful of capers
1-2 anchovy fillets
Juice of one lemon, freshly squeezed
For garnish:
More capers
A few sprigs of parsley, finely minced
A few basil leaves
Directions
Lay out the tomato slices decoratively on a serving platter.
Blend all the ingredients for the tonnato sauce in a blender until absolutely smooth. The mixture should be thick but pourable; if not, add a bit more lemon juice. Taste and adjust for salt, although it shouldn’t need much. See our post on vitello tonnato for detailed, step-by-step instructions using homemade mayonnaise.
Pour the sauce over the tomato slices and around the sides. Unlike when making vitello tonnato, you don’t need to be careful to cover the tomatoes entirely with the sauce. In fact, it’s nice to leave some exposed for color.
Sprinkle the top here and there with some capers and the minced parsley. Decorate with basil leaves if you like for more color. Serve immediately.
Notes on Tomato Tonnato
Tomato Tonnato is an easy going dish and just about any kind of tomato will do nicely. Garden grown or farmer’s market tomatoes are best, of course, although the sauce is so tasty that even indifferent supermarket tomatoes will shine. As for the tuna, the finer the the better, but you don’t have to to splurge on incredibly expensive imported ventresca. A decent canned tuna packed in olive oil will do you just fine.
While the whole dish can be made ahead and refrigerated until you’re ready to serve, your Tomato Tonnato will lose it freshness and the juice of the tomatoes tend to run into the sauce. Better to make the sauce ahead and assemble when you’re ready to eat. And really, the thing is so quick and easy it’s really no bother at all to make it at the last minute.
Columbus’s Egg
Here’s one popular version of the story of Columbus’s egg:
After he returned from his first journey across the Atlantic, Columbus was invited to a dinner in his honor hosted by a certain Cardinal Mendoza. A group of the Spanish nobles in attendance were trash talking Columbus’s feat, saying that anyone could have done it if they had the resources Ferdinand and Isabella had put at his disposal. Columbus was furious when he heard this, and he challenged the nobles to try an equally “easy” task: to stand an egg up on the table they were eating at. Each one tried, but failed to make the egg stand up. They finally gave up and asked Columbus to show them how it was done. Columbus gently cracked the egg at one end and stood the egg up easily. The nobles protested that they could have done that, too, to which Columbus replied, “Yes, you could have done it, but the difference, gentlemen, is that I did it.”
From this story comes the expression È come l’uovo di Colombo—”it’s like Columbus’s egg”—to describe something that seems easy or obvious once you actually think of it.
Ingredients
2-3 medium tomatoes, sliced horizontally
For the tonnato sauce:
- 1 can of tunafish
- 250ml/1 cup of mayonnaise, preferably homemade
- A spoonful of capers
- 1-2 anchovy fillets
- Juice of one lemon, freshly squeezed
- For garnish:
- More capers
- A few sprigs of parsley, finely minced
- A few basil leaves
Instructions
Lay out the tomato slices decoratively on a serving platter.
Blend all the ingredients for the tonnato sauce in a blender until absolutely smooth. The mixture should be thick but pourable; if not, add a bit more lemon juice. Taste and adjust for salt, although it shouldn't need much. See our post on vitello tonnato for detailed, step-by-step instructions using homemade mayonnaise (see Notes for link).
Pour the sauce over the tomato slices and around the sides. Unlike when making vitello tonnato, you don't need to be careful to cover all the tomatoes with the sauce. In fact, it's nice to leave some exposed for color.
Sprinkle the top here and there with some capers and the minced parsley. Decorate with basil leaves if you like for more color. Serve immediately.
Notes
The recipe for vitello tonnato can be found at:
http://memoriediangelina.com/2010/07/11/vitello-tonnato
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http://memoriediangelina.com/2015/07/17/tomato-tonnato/
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