I get asked “how do you” on all sorts of cooking stuff and yesterday the end of that sentence was “grill tuna steaks” and it got me to thinking that perhaps I should start to write these down as blog posts and here we are!

So to start with, as this is a UK site, let me say that I don’t ever grill tuna as we understand the word grilling.  I think the American use of the word grill is to barbecue it or cook on a griddle. What we call grilling, they call broiling.  The problem with what we call grills is that they can vary so greatly in the distance from the heat to the food and the degree of heat coming off them. Certainly with my own oven, the grill is below waist height so it is a pain to see what is going on too.

Secondly, particularly as this is the UK and we have a tendency to over cook meat, I am assuming that you want your tuna steak pink in the centre!  That is really how it should be cooked.

It is best to make sure that the tuna is at room temperature before you start to cook it rather than straight out of the fridge. It will then really depend on how thick the steaks are – they’re usually cut about 3/4 inch thick from the supermarket and I wouldn’t recommend anything thinner, about an inch is perfect.

Season the steak before you cook it then heat a griddle or frying pan on the hob – no need to add any oil. Once the pan is nice and hot, cook for about a minute and a half to two minutes on each side and then remove to a warm plate, cover with a bit of foil and a tea towel and let it rest for about a minute or so whilst you serve up whatever else you’re having with it and it should be nice and pink in the middle but well cooked on the outside.

Hope that helps!