Take Your Tuna Salad To The Mediterranean With A Few Simple Ingredients

Is tuna salad the most customizable recipe in existence? You'd think so, given how many ways there are to swap out the mayonnaise or all the ingredients you can add to make it extra-crunchy. Still, there's always room for one more tuna tweak, so how about taking your salad on a trip to the Mediterranean? In fact, you can do so by incorporating both a mayonnaise swap (add some olive oil if you're using water-packed tuna; if not, use the oil it came in) and crunchy ingredients. The latter could include sun-dried tomatoes (okay, so maybe these are more chewy than crunchy), chopped red onions, almonds, or roasted chickpeas.

Other ingredients that would give your tuna salad a Mediterranean twist include olives of just about any type (you can't get much more Mediterranean than an olive) as well as marinated artichokes, chopped garlic, and herbs like basil and oregano. You could also try adding parmesan or feta cheese to the salad if you're feeling experimental. 

Whatever you do, don't forget the lemon juice. Lemons are not only a staple of Mediterranean cuisine, they've been traditionally partnered with fish as far back as the Middle Ages. If you'd like to make your Mediterranean tuna salad into a sandwich, you've got plenty of choices there, including pita bread, focaccia, ciabatta, and lavash; all of which would be thematically appropriate.

If you don't want to create your own Mediterranean take on tuna salad, you can always go with a classic salade Niçoise, which comes from Nice, a French city that sits alongside the Mediterranean Côte d'Azur. The salad, which dates back to the 19th century, was originally made with anchovies, olive oil, and tomatoes and possibly augmented by whatever produce happened to be in season. It wasn't seen as fancy food by any means — quite the opposite, in fact — but may have gained some cachet when Auguste Escoffier put his own spin on it by adding green beans and boiled potatoes and swapping the anchovies for canned tuna.

While salade Niçoise is still most often made with tuna today, some recipes (including Julia Child's) buck tradition by including both ingredients. Child served her salad on a bed of lettuce, which seems to be another 20th-century addition to the dish. In addition to canned tuna and anchovies, her version also includes green beans, red potatoes, black olives, boiled eggs, and cherry tomatoes all drizzled in a vinaigrette dressing. Hers is actually one of the simpler salade Niçoises out there, since other recipes call for additions like artichokes, bell peppers, celery, cucumbers, fava beans, or radishes.