Tuna Kilawin

"Kilawin" is a style of cooking where you actually don't cook the food with heat. You cook the meat by marinating it in vinegar and calamansi juice in the refrigerator for a couple of hours. What is calamansi? Click here.

Sound interesting? It is! Sounds weird? To someone who hasn't tried it, yet it is! Does it taste great? Of course it does! Here is what you're going to need:

1 kilo tuna. Fresh is best, but frozen would be good also. As long as it's sashimi grade. The tuna I used was crazy cut Frabelle frozen tuna that I bought at a local Puregold. Crazy cut is ok because I'm going to cutting the fish anyway into smaller pieces. No please don't use canned tuna. It's just not gonna work.

2 big red onions, chopped. I suppose you can use big white onions, but I like the red ones for this particular dish.

1-1/2 tablespoons of grated ginger. Yes, I like grating ginger. I do that so people don't have to bite into pieces of it. It's never a nice experience.

Vinegar. I didn't even measure the vinegar that I used. I bought the liter bottle and I used around over half of it. I'll write how much you need later.

1/2 cup calamansi juice. Or Lemon juice, if you don't have access to calamansi.

4 long green chili peppers, chopped. Or cut into tiny sections with scissors. I'll explain later.

Salt and Pepper. To taste, as always.

Ok, here's how you do it:

First thing you do is to chop the tuna into smaller pieces, if they aren't already are, and put it into a bowl.

Next is you pour enough vinegar over it to somewhat cover the meat. With a spoon or with your hands, gently wash the tuna over with the vinegar. Leave it there for a couple of minutes and then drain the vinegar completely.

Now place your tuna in your serving bowl and pour about a cup of fresh vinegar on it. Add the chopped red onions, calamansi juice, ginger, salt and pepper (I ended up using around a 3/4 tablespoon of salt and a teaspoon of ground black pepper).

Finally, get your green chili peppers and what I like to do is to cut them into small ring sections using scissors. Now I can do this on a cutting board with a knife, but I generally try to avoid as much contact with the insides of the pepper with my fingers (I'll probably tell the story one day as to why) and scissoring the pepper directly over the food works well with me.

With a spoon gently stir all the ingredients around until the vinegar, calamansi, ginger, salt and pepper permeate the entire thing. Cover and put into the refrigerator for at least two hours. Once or twice take the bowl out and stir, just to make sure the vinegar does its job on all parts of the tuna. After all, it is the vinegar and calamansi juice that will cook this dish.

After two hours, the dish is ready to serve. Make sure to serve this dish cold!