Big Eye Tuna al Tarocco

Now that the holiday craziness has died down at work I'm starting to hit my stride with a pretty consistent schedule. Two days off in a row in fact! It's allowed me to start planning to take on some of the more complicated and prep heavy recipes of the book. This next one is a prime example. Just look at some of the produce that it required at Whole Foods.

There are quite a few ingredients plus three other sub-recipes that make up this dish. So the shopping and sourcing are taking longer and I have to allow myself more time to make these dishes shine. Because of that, this is probably not the most practical recipe for the average home cook. Many would probably say 'why should I go through the trouble of finding all of these ingredients' or 'do I really need two sauces on one plate?' But again, this is not your average cookbook for the average joe. It's designed to challenge you in the way that you would be challenged if you were one of the line cooks at Babbo. I'm trying to recreate a dining experience at an amazing restaurant that I've never been to. Insane isn't it? 

I won't waste too much time with the chit chat today as I have a lot of work to do. I will mention that the tuna was fresh sushi grade, that Whole Foods had almost everything I needed with the exception of mizuna so I substituted fresh spinach, and the name 'al torocco' means blood orange in Italian which flavors one of the sauces in this recipe. 

I start by making the sweet garlic cloves. Peeled garlic cloves get browned in extra virgin olive oil. Once browned i add sweet vermouth and reduce until syrupy. The cloves get put aside and cooled. 

Next up on the list is to make the blood orange vinaigrette. I love how Mario pushes the creativity envelope and creates some different than expected vinaigrettes. I start with juicing fresh blood oranges and reduce the juice by half. 

Once reduced, I add Dijon mustard, olive paste, salt, and pepper, then whisk in some extra virgin olive oil. 

Next up I have to make some parsley oil. I've actually made this for another recipe in the book before so I'll skip boring you with the details again. 

Here is a look at the rest of the ingredients prepped and ready to go. Quite a bit huh? 

Now I can get cooking. First we have to preheat the oven to 350°, why I'm not really sure as the rest of the recipe never mentions what it's needed for, unless you want to throw in your tuna to cook it past medium rare. But we're foodies so why would we want to do that?

I follow up by sautéing sliced shiitake mushrooms, minced red onion, and thyme until the mushrooms are crispy. These get seasoned and set aside. 

Next I coat the tuna steaks with instant potato flakes, which intrigues me, and sauté the steaks for about three minutes per side keeping them medium rare. 

While the tuna is cooking, I heat olive oil in a sauté pan and add orange segments, mizuna or in this case spinach, the sweet garlic cloves and radicchio over high heat until warmed through. 

It's time to plate. The recipe makes no mention of what to do with the shiitakes but I figure they get plated first, the radicchio salad on top of that, followed by the tuna steak, some extra salad and the vinaigrette and parsley oil. 

Wow. There's a lot going on here. But it all compliments each other well. This plate looks better than most of what your local restaurants will put out. I really like the potato flake crust, I'm totally using that again. All in all my wife liked this enough to want me to remake it in the future. This is probably the nicest looking plate I've put out so far. 

Until next time...