This Lemon-Dill Tuna Salad is dressed lightly with mayo/yogurt and jam-packed with lots of tasty things like sweet pickles, celery, and shallot. It makes a fantastic sandwich.

This salad is light on mayo and yogurt. That elevates the dill and lemon – which are especially good with the tuna – higher up in the flavor profile. It also leaves the tuna tasting very fresh. This is much more nuanced than what I usually think of as a tuna salad sandwich, and it’s quickly become my favorite.

Social Learning

If you make four sandwiches, they’ll be impressively generous without being obscene. Stretching it to six is hardly meager. Do so while laying on generous amounts of the optional toppings, and you’re right back into the “impressively generous” territory.

This recipe is easily halved. But don’t worry about the leftovers. (See below.)

About the ingredients…

This is a juicy tuna salad, so it needs a bread that’s not too soft and certainly not mushy. An artisan loaf of cracked wheat farm bread is perfect. Toast would also be a nice choice.

You might wonder what the hell sugar is doing in the ingredient list. Leave it out if you want, but don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. It’s a small amount, but I find that it brightens up the flavors – especially the lemon, I think – without leaving the salad tasting even remotely sweetened.

Tomato adds a bit of flavor, but not a ton. I think the tomato might go better with the sandwich if you toasted the bread. The avocado flavor gets almost completely (but not quite) lost in the sandwich, but it adds a really nice dimension to the texture. 

The garnish makes sense only if you’re serving this open-faced, or in some similar fashion. You can see that I didn’t bother with this, only because I forgot. I usually eat whatever I photograph either during or immediately after shooting it, and sometimes I’m just so excited to get to it that I forget to garnish.

Afterward…

The shallot and tuna will remain with you for quite some time, so you’ll want something to clear your palate: one or two large glasses of sparkling water, a mug of tea, or something citrusy or tart but not sugary. Surprisingly, this effect diminishes in about 24 hours – not in your mouth (hahaha) but in the tuna itself. That’s why I recommend that as the upper end of the chill time.

It keeps quite nicely in the fridge. Four days later, this tuna salad is just as good as it was when it was freshly made. You do have to give it a good stir when it comes time to use it, though.

The Backstory

I like to make tuna salad, but using lemon and dill as the backbone for one is new for me, and I’m so glad I tried it. 

One of the sources that I modeled this recipe after is That Skinny Chick Can Bake, which I regularly frequent. Liz – the site’s author – recommends using jarred tuna fillets. I recommend an imported Italian tuna for the same reason: higher quality. In this recipe, the taste of the tuna is much more front-and-center than it is in the everyday tuna salad your grandmother made, so you want a tuna that tastes great right out of the can. Indeed, as far back as 1893, a New York socialite wrote a gourmet cookbook called Beverages and Sandwiches for Your Husband’s Friends, because, I don’t know, her friends didn’t matter? And in it, she recommended imported tuna for her tuna sandwiches. Granted, local tuna wasn’t a thing, and she was wealthy. But still. You want a good tuna.

The tuna sandwich has a massive backstory in the U.S. An easy internet search will give you tons of interesting information about it. Some people used to make their tuna salad sandwiches with “boiled dressing,” which is apparently a homemade version of Miracle Whip, which was, before the invention of the food processor or stick blender, easier to make that mayo. They also used to add things like chopped boiled eggs, sweet corn, and/or black olives to their tuna salad. I love all those ideas. (I thought cucumber slices would be a good addition, but they weren’t.)

Lemon-Dill Tuna Salad

Credit for images on this page: Make It Like a Man! unless otherwise credited. This content was not solicited by anyone, nor was it written in exchange for anything. Thank you, Kesor and ⌘+C. Huge thank you to my food hero, Harold McGee. References: BHG, Eating Well, That Skinny Chick Can Bake. Make It Like a Man! is ranked by Feedspot as #13 in the Top 30 Men’s Cooking Blogs.

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