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There is no debate.
I’ve somehow become the person people ask about mayonnaise. I didn’t choose this life—it chose me. Along the way, I’ve stumbled into turf wars and feuding loyalties over the best mayo for fresh tomato sandwiches, classic potato salads, and potluck pasta salads. Then there’s tuna salad, where peace talks collapse before the tuna is drained.
It makes sense. Tomatoes bring their own juices. Potatoes have silky starches. Pasta offers nooks for the dressing to cling to. Tuna has none of that. It’s lean, dry, and unforgiving, which means mayo has to earn its keep to keep the peace. You can splurge on top-shelf albacore tuna or load your salad with stir-ins and seasonings, but mediocre mayo will still drag it down.
It’s the toughest test case yet. Picking the right mayo here is the difference between a nostalgic reinvention and a traumatic flashback of lunchroom sorrow. I reached out to five chefs to determine which mayo can turn canned tuna into a salad to savor, and for once, there was no debate.
Meet the Experts
- Frank Tiu: Recipe developer and food writer
- Kat Lieu: Cookbook author and founder of Modern Asian Baking
- Mike Le: Co-founder of I am a Food Blog
- Jessica Furniss: Recipe developer and food writer
- Kendra Vaculin: Recipe developer and food writer
The Best Mayo for Tuna Salad
All five experts whole-heartedly agree, Japanese Kewpie Mayonnaise brings the fat and flavor that tuna desperately needs.
For a low-stakes potato salad, Tiu says Hellmann’s works just fine; it’s cheaper, ideal for big batches and cookouts. But for tuna salad, Tiu needs more. Kewpie is made with egg yolks only—not whole eggs—and that extra richness compensates for the lean tuna. Its signature blend of vinegars add malty tang and brightness, while its lack of sugar keeps the flavor clean and balanced.
For the other four chefs, Lieu, Le, Furniss, and Vaculin, it’s also Kewpie or bust.
“There’s just something about Kewpie that I reach for whenever a recipe calls for mayo. Maybe it’s the squeeze tube that I like. Maybe it’s the flavor. Maybe it’s the color,” says Lieu. Mostly, she says, it’s the umami, a savory backbone to this mayo that comes from MSG. “That brings out the natural umami of the fish.”
Furniss adds, “I haven’t found any recipe that doesn’t taste just a little better when Kewpie mayo is substituted for regular mayonnaise, but it works especially great with tuna salads because of the richness.”
Vaculin’s held a similar philosophy since her first squeeze bottle: if you wouldn’t eat the mayo plain, you won’t want to eat what you make with it. “Other ingredients mixed in won’t save bad mayo—you have to start with something that tastes good on its own.”
Le wasn’t always a mayonnaise fan. More than 20 years ago, he spotted Kewpie at an Asian market and bought it out of curiosity. It “looked different than any mayo I’d seen until then. I loved it when I’d been indifferent to mayo before,” he says. He compares its effect in a tuna salad to the buttery, melt-in-your-mouth texture of chutoro and otoro, the prized fatty cuts of the tuna world. “The extra fat content and creaminess of Kewpie makes tuna salad taste like I used a much more expensive cut or can of tuna than I really did.” A conscientious objector-turned-partisan, he and his wife, co-founder of I am a Food Blog, have gone as far as Tokyo to visit the Kewpie Mayo museum.
Read the original article on Simply Recipes
