Ensalada de Tomate con Ventresca de Atún (Spanish-Style Tomato and Ventresca Tuna Salad) Recipe

[Photograph: Sasha Marx]

Did you replenish on a variety of fancy canned tuna earlier this spring? Do you reside for tomato season? Do you spend an excessive amount of time daydreaming concerning the earlier than occasions when you could possibly daydream about touring to locations like Spanish Basque Nation to eat each Cantabrian anchovy and burnt cheesecake in sight? Are you as a substitute, like many others, in the midst of a stressful pandemic housing move, so that you’re making an attempt to filter your pantry and fridge for pre-moving day meals that really feel like a contrived cooking present problem? Or are you only a fan of straightforward, no-fuss, let-good-ingredients-shine salads? In case you answered “sure” to any of those questions, it is best to make this Spanish-style tomato and ventresca tuna salad. In case you’re like me and answered within the affirmative to the entire above, hold in there—and in addition make this salad.

As with a good caprese, there is not an “a-ha” secret element or approach to this tomato and tuna salad, which is in style all through Spain. Put a number of good elements collectively on a plate, then get out of their approach. On this case, these elements are sliced ripe tomatoes, coarse sea salt, olive oil–packed ventresca tuna (fatty tuna stomach), olive oil, and thinly sliced onion.

I fell in love with this dish in a windowless basement at Antonio Bar in San Sebastian, the place it performed the right opener—alongside a plate of salt-cured anchovies swimming in olive oil—to an outrageously flavorful txuleta de viejo (a large ribeye from an precise old cow, not simply an aged steak) with fries.

There is no such thing as a vaca vieja steak cookery occurring in my windowless studio house kitchen proper now. The kitchen is a pre-move Marie Kondo nightmare, with the range and counters coated with stacks of pans, utensils, and a Baking Metal that miraculously did not break each bone in my foot after I tried to cushion its fall as if it have been a soccer ball the opposite day. However I’ve made a pair tomato and ventresca salads for fast and straightforward lunches, with only a few farmers market tomatoes, a can of ventresca, and a few ramps that I pickled a number of months in the past (thinly sliced uncooked spring onions, scallions, or yellow onion are conventional, however I like how vinegar tempers their uncooked chunk, plus, there isn’t any approach all of the do-it-yourself pickles in my fridge are making the transfer with me).