Making a casserole is one of the best ways to improve canned tuna and a great casserole needs a few elements: Noodles that don’t fall apart and good quality seafood are just two of the key factors. But even if you use the best best quality ingredients it won’t matter if the end product dries out completely while it’s cooking leaving you with a seriously unappetizing pile of fish noodles and cheese.
| Channel | Publish Date | Thumbnail & View Count | Actions |
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 ThatDudeCanCook | 2022-01-03 01:24:14 |  273,139 Views |
The Tuna Casserole Everyone Should Know How to Make
Luckily there’s a fairly simple way around this problem: cook all of the components of your casserole before assembling and baking it. The logic here is pretty simple: certain dry ingredients will absorb the moisture from the casserole as you bake it drying it out. While there are ways to rehydrate the casserole (such as by adding fat or a little water or stock) it’s easier to avoid these rescue attempts in the first place.
The two biggest culprits here are noodles and flour (if you’re making a white roux-like sauce for your casserole—though not all recipes call for this) thanks to their starch content. Cook the pasta ahead of time and its starch content will be lower preventing it from absorbing too much liquid. Flour is a bit more of a no-brainer—you’ll generally prepare your roux sauce before you assemble the casserole (rather than just throwing dry flour into the mix) but it’s worth it to make sure the sauce is well-blended and moist enough that the flour doesn’t cause extra absorption.
Of course some cooks aren’t fans of the idea of parboiling pasta before adding it to your casserole. Their argument is that fully cooking your noodles before baking the casserole can make them mushy and unpleasant—in fact it’s the opposite problem where things are too moist. If you’re wary of this there’s a happy medium you can find. Soak your uncooked pasta or noodles in a bowl of warm salted water for about 45 minutes before adding them to the mixture. This will give them a little extra moisture and allow some of the starch to leach into the water (which you’ll discard) so they don’t soak up all the moisture but also don’t become mushy. You can try simply parboiling the noodles before adding them but it can be difficult to predict the exact timing that will ensure the noodles are perfectly cooked when the casserole comes out of the oven.
