Hardwood Smoked Ahi Tuna

We love smoked salmon in our household, so when we saw that Trader Joe's had a new product that was smoked ahi tuna, we knew we had to try it. The full product name was "sesame crusted hardwood smoked ahi tuna," and it was indeed crusted with lots of white and black sesame seeds. The ingredient list was pretty simple - just tuna, salt, sesame seeds, sesame oil, and hardwood smoke (but which hardwood? Curious minds want to know!).

The back of the package listed several suggestions for how to use the tuna - chopping it up for a salad, adding it to a rice bowl, making smoked tuna sushi, eating it with a bagel and cream cheese, or just eating it plain. Although smoked tuna sushi sounded like a great idea (haven't had sushi in forever), we decided to just pair it with some white rice, edamame, soy sauce, and sesame oil for a very simple bowl lunch. (I don't know if I would call it a poke bowl - haven't had one of those in a long time either - because there weren't really any other toppings, but I guess it could be a very barebones one.)

The tuna looked really good coming out of the package, but we didn't love it as much as we thought we would (especially considering all the internet raves). It tasted fishy, and the texture was a bit tougher to chew than we expected. Also, we knew it would be somewhat salty since it was smoked fish (and one package is 1210 mg of sodium), but it tasted really salty. Combined with plain edamame and rice, it did make for a nice, light, healthy lunch, and the other parts of the bowl did temper the salt and fishiness a little bit, but we probably wouldn't recommend eating it plain.

Buy again? Not for us. I wasn't a fan of the fishiness, and for both of us, it was just not as good an option as other products at TJ's. We prefer the smoked salmon that TJ's sells. Not 100% sure what the price comparison is between the two, since that's the one TJ's receipt from the past couple of months that we can't find, but the internet tells me it's $5.99 for the tuna (50 cents cheaper than the smoked wild sockeye for the same portion size). That's not a huge difference, so between the two, we'd pick the wild sockeye instead.