Easy Grilled Tuna Steaks à la Niçoisé
By: Sheri Wetherell
Published: February 1, 2013

Chef Marco Pierre White shows us his twist on the traditional Niçoisé Salad (or Salade Niçoisé) in this Grilled Tuna Steaks Niçoisé recipe. This delicious tuna recipe is easy and can be made in just 15 minutes! There's no need to follow a recipe, just watch below, learn and do.


Grilled Tuna Steaks Niçoisé’ is a very simple dish, capers, cherry tomatoes, black olives, green olives, olive oil, lemon juice, herbs to garnish, it’s very simple, there is no recipe.  As I’ve said many times, cooking is a philosophy, not a recipe.  If you don’t like capers, don’t put them in.  If you don’t like green olives, don’t put them in.  So it’s very simple.  So what we do is, is we take the green olives, just cut them into petals, only about three per olive and the same with the black.  So then what we do is, in a large bowl, some capers.  And again it depends, your choice.  And then we take some cherry tomatoes and just cut them in half.  This is a dish I do many times in the summer in the garden.  All it really is, is an assembly of good ingredients.  Buy good olives, buy good capers, good cherry tomatoes, good olive oil.  And we put some olive oil in.  It’s always good to make this an hour/two hours before and just leave it somewhere to take the chill out of the tomatoes if they come out of the fridge.  And it’s normally about three to one, one lemon to three oil.  So there’s our garnish for the tuna, make our paste, and again a little olive oil.  Take our fish paste and just put a little bit on each one and just massage it in.  I’ll just turn it over.
Supermarkets are amazing.  You can almost buy everything in them now.  I bought this down the local supermarket, and you know there was sea bass, there was sea bream, good salmon, calamari, shrimps, and then just a little bit of oil.  And what we do is … the secret of grilling at home is to make sure your pan is very hot because the last thing you want is the tuna or the steak sticking to the pan.  And the great thing about tuna, tuna’s very easy to cook because you can see what’s happening if you just look at the side of it.  You should treat tuna like a steak; some people like it rare, some people like it medium rare, medium or well done.  Me, personally, I like it rare.  A piece of tuna so thick which is a good inch, about two minutes each side and then you get it nice and rare in the middle.  I personally like my steak and tuna quite thick so I buy a loin and then cut it myself.  The fishmonger normally chop’s it into six ounce steaks, but remember, a six ounce steak can be so thick.  A six ounce steak can be so thick, so you have to take a view on things.  So a piece of tuna this size is about two minutes each side.  So I just bring my tuna into the middle, there’s enough heat in the pan to continue cooking it.
And then what we do, we take our garnish, drain off the oil, and be always generous with the garnish.  The problem I find when I go to a lot of restaurants, they never give me enough garnish for my steak, for my piece of fish.  So I’ve got a half piece of fish but I’ve eaten all my garnish or I’ve eaten all my sauce.  So I always like to have a lot of garnish.  And then what we do is just take some herbs, parsley is good, you know, fresh coriander’s good, basil’s good.  And again just sprinkle them on and some salt, just a little bit on your tomatoes, just on your tomatoes, olives are salty enough.  And I like to serve food on a platter because I like to put it in the middle of the table because I feel that people engage.  And there’s our tuna steak Niçoisé.  No recipe, very simple, all we are doing is, it’s a mixture of ingredients which all work well together.