A 4-ingredient plant-based alternative to tuna salad

Turns out, it's all about the pickle juice 🥒

Hi friends,

As someone who’s always had a soft spot for classic tuna salad (my mom used to make it a lot when we were kids), I wanted to come up with a plant-based whole-food alternative.

There are already a ton of vegan “tuna” salad recipes online, but most of them use chickpeas instead of canned fish. I personally wasn’t thrilled with this idea because the texture and color of chickpeas is quite different. But white beans? They seemed to me a much better fit.

Over the past few months, I’ve been experimenting with my white bean “tuna” and I’m finally ready to share it with you. It’s gone through several iterations (one included blended walnuts and was actually pretty good, but lended an unwanted pink-ish color) and the best version turned out to be the simplest: this salad has just 4 ingredients and requires zero cooking.

The secret is the pickle juice. Incorporating some of that neon liquid into the salad infuses the beans with a similar salty, briny flavor canned tuna is known for.

This vegan tuna salad is not the fanciest or prettiest meal you’ll find on my site, but it is something you can throw together quickly and enjoy over a couple of days. It’s the perfect thing to pile on sourdough in the morning before heading out the door…

P.S. Wanna bookmark this recipe for later? Save it on Pinterest.

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