Ino Kuvacic’s split-style tuna is a mouth-wateringly modern take on a very old Croatian recipe.
Shut your eyes, and you’ll feel like you’re dining right by Croatia’s azure waters
Tuna is such a good match with red wine and onions, and that’s what makes this dish so delicious.
Ingredients
• 1kg tuna steaks
• olive oil, for drizzling
• sea salt
• freshly ground black pepper
For the red wine and onion sauce:
• 2 brown onions, thinly sliced
• 100ml extra virgin olive oil
• 4 garlic cloves, crushed
• 500ml good red wine
• 50ml see method for ingredients or vincotto
• 50 grams sultanas
For the potato salad:
• 3 whole waxy potatoes, such as desiree, sebago or nicola
• 1/2 onion, very thinly sliced
• 100ml extra virgin olive oil
• 30ml white wine vinegar
Method
1 Cut the tuna into 2–3 cm thick slices – you should get five to six slices.
2 For the sauce, sauté the onion in the olive oil for 10–15 minutes on low heat until soft and translucent.
3 Add the garlic and sauté for 5 seconds, then add the wine, varenik and sultanas and boil rapidly until the sauce thickens and has reduced by two-thirds.
4 For the potato salad, cook the potatoes in their skins in boiling salted water until soft. Leave them to cool for approximately 10 minutes.
5 While still warm, peel the skins off and cut them into 1 cm thick slices. Add the spring onion, olive oil, white wine vinegar and season well.
6 Preheat a barbecue grill plate or chargrill pan to high.
7 Grill the tuna quickly on the barbecue, for 2 minutes on each side, just to get nice char marks on the outside of the fish, leaving it raw in the middle.
8 Serve the tuna on the potato salad and garnish with the red wine and onion sauce.
9 Drizzle with olive oil and serve.
Recipe courtesy of Dalmatia © Hardie Grant.
