Terrific American Tinned Tuna from the Pacific
Sustainably line-caught, single-boat tuna at the Roadhouse
We’ve been happily using—and loving—the exceptional Albacore tuna we get from American Tuna for countless years in the kitchens at the Deli, Roadhouse, and Bakehouse. If you’ve had a #14 sandwich at the Deli (“Charlie M.’s Tuna,” named after the tuna-loving father of Mike Monahan, of Monahan’s Seafood Market fame), a Niçoise salad at the Bakeshop, or a tuna melt at the Roadshow, you’ve enjoyed this tuna. I’m super excited that we now get to offer it to you in retail tins! Even better still, the small tins are actually labeled by boat, which means that we know the skipper and the vessel that line-caught the fish in the can. You’ve probably savored, as I have a few hundred times, the beauty of single-origin olive oil. Now we have single-boat tuna, too! What we’ve got on hand at the moment was caught by Gideon Mease and the crew of the boat F/V Widgeon, based out of Newport, Oregon.
American Tuna was founded 22 years ago in San Diego by half a dozen old-school pole-and-line-fishing families. To this day, they line-catch each fish on US-flagged boats. The freshly caught tuna is hand-cut and hand-packed into these small tins without any additions other than salt. Each tin is sealed, and then the tuna is cooked in the tin at small canneries up in Oregon and Washington, so that all the natural juices of the fish are caught up in the can. No added water to, well, water it down.
Joshua Graves, American Tuna’s longtime general manager—with whom I’ve been working regularly for the last year or so to get these small tins to us here in Ann Arbor—says,
American Tuna was created around a very simple idea: if you start with great fish, handle it carefully, and don’t add things that don’t need to be there, you can put a remarkably good piece of tuna in a can. We wanted to think about every step, from the fishing boat to the can, rather than simply changing the label.
Like the Mancini pasta that’s sold at the Deli and consumed in very large quantities in the Mac and Cheese at the Roadhouse—which can be tracked to the field where the wheat used to make it was grown—these retail tins tell us who caught the fish inside.
You can eat the tuna just as is—a bit of salt and pepper and a drizzle of olive oil is my preference, with a slice of Bakehouse Sourdough on the side. It makes great tuna salad, or you can add it to pasta (see the recipe below) or to a spicy, anchovy-spiked tomato sauce served over polenta (something I learned to do in the Piedmont region of Italy many years ago).
These single-boat tins of tuna are available on the Roadhouse retail shelves for tuna lovers like you and me to take home. They should be in stock at the Deli soon, too!
