Sauces, Dips & Spreads

Buck's tuna salad is made with dolphin-safe dry-pack albacore tuna, which goes into an electric mixer with mayo, onion, and celery. Because it's in a mixer instead of a food processor, you get flakes of fish and it never turns to mush. There's just enough mayo to hold it together, and the celery and red onion seem insignificant - until you taste. It has the right amount of crunch and onion bite. Like Buck's tuna salad at Whole Foods, this is made in a mixer. Make two cans at once, so the beaters can whir the salad properly. The tuna should not be pureed or pasty, but a little flaky.

Nothing is better than homemade pesto. This simple sauce highlights basil's cool flavor and bright color, and it's so easy to make. Spinach-Basil pesto brings life to a mixture of pasta, beans and corn. Just be sure to blanch your greens to keep the pesto from turning dark and dull. The problem with green pestos is that when tossed with hot pasta, their color can go from vibrant to murky in seconds. So keep your pesto bright by blanching the greens briefly in boiling water, and then 'shocking; them in ice water.

I first tasted freshly caught grilled seafood with salsas on the beach in a small restaurant in Mexico. Wrapped in warm flour tortillas, they make an ideal lunch or dinner. You can skip the tortillas and serve this with rice or quinoa. You need 10 bamboo skewers. 

Charles Vollmar of Epicurean Exchange in the Bay Area keeps this pesto on the dry side to garnish a saute of spring vegetables. Or thin it with pasta cooking water and use it as a pasta sauce.

Celebrated cookbook author Jacques Pepin made this dish for a party recently. He used the bright coral salmon that you would eat on a bagel with cream cheese. The pate, which is pureed, has the pleasing quality of an unusual tartare. I happened to have some hot-smoked salmon in the fridge and made his pate using that. The fish is nothing like the slightly oily slices of regular smoked salmon. Hot-smoked, as the name suggests, is cooked on a hot fire until it's fully done and flaky. Sometimes called "smoked-roasted" salmon, hot-smoked salmon is usually sold in small pieces.

The tropical flavors of this quick mango salsa complement chicken, pork or mild white fish.

Lovers of fried fish get the taste without all the calories in this recipe. Seasoned whole-wheat flour improves the usual fish-and-chips batter. A good pilsner or lager makes this dish taste best-and since you only need 1/2 cup, there's some left over for the cook to enjoy.

A simple fresh salsa, chopped to a pleasing texture in the food processor, is all you need to complement succulent roast salmon. This salsa is endlessly versatile, so try it with other fish, chicken breasts or on top of scrambled eggs. 

This recipe originally accompanied Baja Fish Tacos.