Seafood Recipes
Learn New Ways to Cook San Diego-Landed Seafood
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Photo by Oriana Poindexter
Spicy Fish Handroll
Buying a whole fish for sashimi? Don’t let anything go to waste! After saving the beautiful fillets for your sashimi or sushi nigiri, take any trim/scrap pieces, and use a spoon to scrape off the remaining meat from the bones, or behind the head—to make a super easy filling for hand rolls.
Kristina’s Home Canned Tuna
If you end up with more fresh fish than you can handle, try out this home canning method to preserve the meat to enjoy later.
You can use meat from any part of the tuna for canning, including all the oddly shaped bits & pieces trimmed from the lion, head, or carcass. Or, try with other species you have in abundance, like swordfish or salmon!
Basque Inspired Tuna Head Soup
After you’ve used the rest of the tuna - this stock recipe is the perfect way to continue enjoying the flavor of the fish.
Pull out your biggest stock pot for this one!
Tuna Hoedoep-bap | Korean Sashimi Salad over Rice
Hoedoep-bap is distinguished from other raw fish salads by the overlying sauce, a blend of the Korean pepper paste gochujang, which is thoroughly mixed into the bowl before the first bites are taken. The gochujang sauce is spicy, a little sweet, and bold in flavor, making it an excellent option for diverse cuts of fish with characteristics like sinew, irregular shape, or oxidization.
Local Fish Poke
Poke is a feast for the eye as well as the taste buds, with the attractive variety of vegetables and seafood that can be used. It’s a very approachable way to eat raw fish, and inherently customizable. Curb your habit of purchasing poke, and learn to make it yourself, if you have the luxury of access to locally landed, high quality tuna, opah, or yellowtail.
Pan Seared Tuna Cheeks
The cheek of the tuna is one of my favorite pieces, and for a long time, we would hide behind the sushi bar and save it for ourselves.
But we found that other people really liked to explore the cuisine, and this is the filet mignon of the tuna. It’s a very fatty tissue that is never really utilized, there’s no sinew, or strong muscle tissue in it.
Tuna Bloodline Yakitori
This dish may seem strange to the American palate, but it has been around in one form or another since humans started eating fish. If you can’t get bloodline, ask your fishmonger for meat closer to the bloodline, which has concentrated sinews.
Tuna Tail Cuts, Two Ways
Here are two approaches for my personal favorite tuna part, the tail meat. Over in Gloucester, we get Atlantic bluefin tuna, but these tail meat recipes work for any tuna tail you can get your hands on.
Fin’s Tuna Treats
A crunchy, tasty treat for your fish-loving fur babies!
Try this recipe with strips of tuna trimmed off the loin, belly, or scraped from the frame. You can also try it with pieces from other fish, particularly yellowtail.
Tuna Eyeball Juice
This zero waste technique by Davin Waite from the Wrench and Rodent shows a unique way to use the tuna eyeball to make a sauce to dress nigiri.
Fish Burgers
Cooking for a crowd? Try this heart-healthy spin on a burger cookout using tuna mince.
This recipe will yield four pounds of burgers, enough for 16 quarter-pound patties or 8 hearty half-pound patties.
Mediterranean Tuna Salad
Use your favorite olive oil-packed canned tuna to prep this recipe - or take it up a notch by canning your own! This tuna salad works well on its own as a side, mixed into a larger green salad, or as the filling to an epic tuna melt or quesadilla.
Vietnamese Caramel Glazed Tuna Collar
This glaze transforms a simple grilled collar into the centerpiece of a meal to gather around.
Use this glaze for any species of tuna, or try it with yellowtail, grouper, whole rockfish, or even opah. Collars from larger fish will take longer on the grill but also provide more food.
Chef Christina’s beautiful caramel glazed tuna collar is the star of our site’s home page in this video by Sam Wells of Chef Epic.
Fish Skewers
Prepare these skewers with trim pieces of swordfish, tuna or other firm fish.