The Simple Substitute For Avoiding Watery Tuna Salad

Tuna salad is an appetizing lunch staple for many folks, but when it's soupy, no one wants to go near it. The juices intermingling with the fish are entirely unappealing and you can tell by looking at it that the texture is going to have an unpleasant mouthfeel. There are dozens of ways to upgrade tuna salad, but before you can elevate the flavor, it has to start with a decent consistency.

There are a few ways tuna salad can become a watery disaster, but the most common by far is incorporating juice from the can into the dish. Thankfully, this is an easy fix. Instead of using canned tuna, use a variety that comes packaged in a pouch. It may cost a little extra, but it typically contains much less liquid content than its canned counterpart. 

Even if you properly drain the canned version by putting it in a strainer and squeezing out the moisture, it will still be wetter than flakey fish from a pouch. The key to a balanced tuna salad is all about the ratio of wet ingredients to dry ingredients. Substituting canned tuna for the pouched product is the easiest way to make sure the seafood is dry before adding ingredients that make it creamy, but there are other alternatives if all you have is canned Chicken of the Sea.

If your tuna salad is coming out goopy even when using the pouched variety, you might need to take more extreme measures to achieve the right consistency. Thankfully, these can be just as tasty as they are practical. Swapping avocado for the mayo in tuna salad gets you a creamy result that won't be overly moist. If the mayo has already been blended in, it's too late for a substitute, but you can add hard-boiled eggs to the mix to thicken up the texture. Store-bought croutons can also be mixed in to suck up any unwanted moisture while also adding some crunch to the dish.

Soupy tuna salad is unpleasant, but dry tuna salad is arguably worse. If your dish ends up looking like something you'd feed your cat, a bit of mayo will get it where it needs to be. However, if you want to incorporate some zest while making it creamy, you can add more flavor to tuna salad by substituting mayo with ranch. Still, once a wet ingredient is added, you can't remove it. Substituting pouched tuna for the canned product and cautiously introducing wet ingredients is key to achieving the appetizing consistency you're looking for.