Sunday, August 29, 2010

Everyday Yumminess: Pan-Seared Tuna with Ginger-Shiitake Cream Sauce

I made this dish for the first time probably 10 years ago. I remember being in my parents' kitchen. We melted the butter, added the ginger, garlic, scallions, and cilantro, and were blown away by how amazing the kitchen suddenly smelled. We knew at that moment that making this dish was a brilliant idea. For reasons I can't fathom, I haven't made this in 5 or 6 years. After tasting it again last night, it definitely won't be that long before I make it again. You can find the original recipe here so you can make this at home. It's literally 10 minutes of prep and 10 minutes of cooking before you're sitting down to an amazing meal. Things start out with fresh, delicious tuna...
The other ingredients are shiitake mushrooms, ginger, garlic, scallions, cilantro, lime juice, and cream.
I got everything for this dish other than the cream at H-Mart, which makes it a nice one-stop-shopping dish. They have tuna (and all of the produce) for a fantastic price, which makes it possible to serve this more often rather than just saving it for special occasions... Anyway, the shiitakes are stemmed and sliced, the scallions and cilantro are thinly sliced, and the garlic and ginger are grated on a course microplane grater (or finely minced).
(The picture above has the wrong amount of soy sauce, by the way. I was going back and forth with prep between two dishes with large amounts of soy sauce, and got the quantities mixed up for a minute...) The tuna is seared off in a hot pan (90-120 seconds per side) then placed in a 200°F oven while you make the sauce. I didn't take pictures of the sauce-making, since I was talking with a friend and just enjoying how insanely good my kitchen was smelling... but it's super-easy. You melt some (Amish) butter, add the garlic, ginger, scallions, and cilantro, stir for a bit, add the shiitakes and soy, stir for a bit, add the cream, simmer for a bit, add the lime juice, and that's it. You're done. I plated mine up with a little jasmine rice and was a very happy camper...
It's not the world's most beautiful dish (with the tuna kind of clashing with the sauce...), but it's seriously delicious. The only thing I tweak in the original recipe is that a full batch of sauce usually serves 4 people (with rice) rather than 6 if you give people as much sauce as they want... because it is very very delicious. Otherwise, it's pretty much a perfect recipe. Try it out someday soon... You can thank me later.

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