Faux Tuna Salad

Sun, Oct 9, 2016

Even if I wasn’t already eating vegan, the current threat of heavy metal contaminants in fish and other ocean creatures would be enough to put me off tuna salad for the rest of my life.

Back in the day, however, tuna salad was a staple—a can of tuna, some mayonnaise and mustard, maybe a hard boiled egg, and a large spoonful of pickle relish, mixed together and spooned atop a lettuce leaf or spread on a piece of bread. The stuff of dreams …

When I was in college, one of my classmates worked for a food truck company that sold breakfast and lunch to construction workers at job sites. “Guess what’s in the tuna sandwiches?” he asked me one day.

“Tuna?” I replied.

“Chicken,” he said. “Chicken is cheaper, see? So we squeeze the oil out of the tuna can into the canned chicken, mix it up, and, voilà, faux tuna … They’d never even suspect otherwise.”

Well, I’m happy to say there’s no chicken in this faux tuna. The secret ingredient is garbanzo beans.

Faux Tuna Salad

Faux Tuna Ingredients

• 2 15-oz cans garbanzo beans, rinsed and drained
• 4 celery stalks washed and chopped
• 4-5 tablespoons pickle relish (try Mt. Olive “Simply Relish Deli-Style Sweet”)
• 1 teaspoon dried minced onions (also may be called onion flakes)
• 4 teaspoons nutritional yeast
• 2 tablespoons soy sauce
• 6 tablespoons Vegan Mayonnaise (see Recipe below)
• 1 teaspoon kelp powder*
• 1 teaspoon lemon juice

Instructions for Faux Tuna

• Mash the garbanzo beans together in a large mixing bowl. I use a potato masher, but a fork also works. (I first tried using the Vitamix for this, but it quickly makes a paste of the garbanzo beans that is hard to scrape out of the carafe.)

• Chop the celery by hand or in a food processor. (I put a cup’s worth at a time of 1 to 2-inch chunks of celery through the hole in the lid of the Vitamix and whiz briefly at Variable Speed 3-4.)

• Transfer chopped celery into the mixing bowl and add remaining ingredients, stirring to combine. Add more mayonnaise, relish, or kelp powder, as desired.

• Serve as salad with red grapes or spread on whole grain bread.

• Makes about 3-4 cups.

If there’s any left over, store remaining Faux Tuna in a covered container in the refrigerator.

Vegan Mayonnaise Ingredients

• 1 package soft or silken tofu
• 3 tablespoons Dijon mustard
• 2 teaspoons white vinegar
• 1 teaspoon lemon juice

Instructions for Vegan Mayonnaise

• Blend tofu, mustard, vinegar, and lemon juice in medium mixing bowl. (I use my handy immersion blender—the Cuisinart Smart Stick—for this.)

• Store mayonnaise in the regrigerator in a glass jar with a tight lid.

*You may have to search for kelp powder. Our town is so backward, even the health food store doesn’t carry it. We sometimes substitute dulse flakes for the kelp powder (which adds nutrition, though not much flavor).

Happy Tuna! Hmm, isn’t there a play called that?

— Rebecca