Vitello Tonnato
Veal in tuna sauce is an absolute classic in Italian cooking, and it never fails to please. Here’s the easiest and most fantastic vitello tonnato recipe.
Another absolute classic in Italian cooking that never fails to impress. Even children get carried away long enough to finish what is on their plates. The idea of combining veal with tuna first popped up 150 years ago in Piedmont and Liguria, where tuna fish were caught and preserved. At that time, cooks would pound the fish with lemon juice, olive oil and capers to make a cream sauce. Later some genius decided to add egg yolks (or mayonnaise) which eliminated a lot of the hard work and improved the taste.
This version cheats by using canned tuna and a good ready-made mayonnaise, but it is still delicious and can be served hot or cold as a starter or a main course. For a more elegant antipasti version of vitello tonnato try the Marta Grassi recipe. (And – I know it borders on sacrilege, but – the tuna sauce can also be used to pimp up leftover veal roast or butter beans.)
Ingredients
For the meat
½-1 kg topside or round of veal
2 carrots
2 celery stalks
1 onio
2 bay leaves
1 tsp pepper corn
salt
For the sauce
2 cans of tuna in olive oil
3 tbsp mayonnaise
1 lemon juice
2 tbsp capers
4 anchovies
Olive oil
Preparation
Cover the meat with water and let it boil with cleaned, chopped carrots and celery, a whole peeled onion and herbs for about 1 hour until the meat is tender (it depends on the cut).
Leave the meat to cool in the soup and put it in the freezer for a couple of hours, if you want wafer-thin machine-cut slices.
Don’t throw away the filtered soup – it may be used to water down the tuna sauce or as a base for minestrone.
Blend dried canned tuna with mayonnaise, lemon juice, olive oil, capers and anchovies.
Add soup from the veal to obtain the right – not too thick – texture.
The sauce should be a little runny to amalgamate with the meat.
Slice the veal as thin as possible.
Arrange the slices of veal in layers and cover each layer with tuna sauce.
Leave the dish in the refrigerator to rest for a couple of hours.
Decorate with slices of lemon and capers and serve vitello tonnato with plenty of nice bread to soak up the sauce in the proper Italian scarpetta-style.
One of my favoruite Italian recipes!
xx,
E.
ww.theslowpace.com
Mine too:)
Nice version. A few remarks though:
-Using canned tuna is perfectly fine. In fact, the authentic recipe uses canned tuna. The as far as I know first written recipe of this dish dates back to 1891. It’s in “La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene” by Artusi. A lot of people tend to think canning of tuna or other fish was a pretty recent discovery, but it actually was pretty mainstream already about halfway 19th century.
-Why is everyone insisting on the tinliest slices of veal? Using 1.5 to 2 mm gives much more juiciness, meat flavor and mouthfeel. It is probably the most authentic, too.
-Why cover the meat with the sauce? If you did a good job with the veal it’s aesthetically more pleasing seeing the juices running out of nice pink cuts of veal, while it gives the person actually eating the dish the opportunity to taste both veal and sauce apart and together.
Thank you for the insight:) It’s much appreciated, and I agree that some restaurants tend to cut the meat in too thin slices. I always do it by hand, and I doubt I can make it thinner than 1.5-2 mm. The issue of covering the meat with the sauce is a matter of taste. You are probably right that it might be more aesthetically pleasing to keep the ingredients separate, but I really like it, when meat and sauce becomes one. In fact, I almost prefer the second day version of vitello tonnato to a freshly made one.