Healthy Tuna Salad Recipes

Nan McEvoy created this salad after falling in love with the incredible olive oil-poached tuna prepared by her friend Paul Bertolli, the former chef at Oliveto's in nearby Oakland. McEvoy uses albacore tuna here, but any fresh tuna will do. In addition to spooning the salad into avocado halves, she also uses it as a sandwich filling and a topping for crostini.

Purists would insist on imported Italian canned tuna fish for the Tuscan classic, but we think plain old tuna from the supermarket is just fine, too. However, make sure the fish is packed in oil; not only will the tuna be infinitely more flavorful, we use the oil as part of the dressing.

The style of frying and mashing the dried chiles is very familiar to cooks from this part of Vietnam. But when developing my version of the recipe, I used Mexican ancho chiles, which work a lot better for American cooks. I also use capers in place of the small, salted, pickled vegetables that are not available in this country.—Andrew Zimmern

A recipe from Giada De Laurentiis, from the 2007 Classic in Aspen.

This quick and easy main-course salad offers all the variety and freshness of a great antipasto. The quality of this dish ultimately depends on the quality of the tuna: Using an Italian or Spanish variety packed in olive oil makes the salad extraordinary.

Big, creamy butter beans give a tuna and celery salad terrific heartiness. The salad would also be delicious spooned over slices of warm grilled country bread.

This chunky tuna salad—inspired by a traditional sauce from Livorno, Italy, of tomatoes, olives and capers—makes a very satisfying one-dish meal.

This is chef George Mendes’s version of the simple tomato salads common in the Algarve region of southern Portugal. For a shortcut, use best-quality, olive oil–packed canned tuna.

Gwyneth Paltrow transforms one of her favorite salads, the Niçoise, into a hearty one-dish dinner by roasting tuna steaks on a tangle of beans, tomatoes, anchovies and olives.

For this Mediterranean-inflected salad, chef Seamus Mullen likes poaching fresh tuna or bonito in olive oil; store-bought fish jarred in olive oil works very well, too.