The makers of Safe Catch sent me a few cans of their wild skipjack and wild albacore tuna to try. Safe Catch is tested for mercury and is made of sustainably-caught tuna. Before Safe Catch, I didn’t know that there’s basically a little bit of mercury in all types of fish, and there’s even a wide variation in mercury levels in fish of the same species. Who knew? (Cue the More You Know rainbow.) Before I even started messing around with various recipes using this tuna, I tasted both the wild skipjack and the albacore tuna plain, straight out of the can. The skipjack tuna was light-colored, although not as pure white as the albacore, and had a more intense tuna flavor than the albacore, which, honestly, tasted like dry plain white chicken breast. I think that’s probably why people like it, but I much preferred the briny fishiness of the wild skipjack. Safe Catch’s wild skipjack is also nearly a dollar cheaper per can than its wild albacore. Generally, though, both types of tuna didn’t taste drastically different than the canned tuna I usually buy, but I did take comfort in knowing that I was tasting sustainably-caught tuna with minimal mercury levels.

The wild skipjack tuna makes a great tuna salad, which I loaded up with chopped red bell peppers, celery, homemade mayo (you have to make your own on Whole30, but I promise it’s easy), mustard and salt and pepper. I love red bell pepper and paprika in my tuna for added color and a light sweetness.

Also, you should note that the cucumber cups you see here are actually much larger than the ones I ultimately used when I served them to friends. I liked the height of the cups when I was taking photos, but after I tasted one with this giant cup, the cucumber completely overshadowed the tuna. In the recipe below, I recommend slicing the cucumber into 1/2-inch disks, which lends to a much better tuna-to-cucumber ratio.

Then again, if we’re talking about little, stumpy cucumbers, then maybe I should be calling them tuna cucumber rafts and not cups, eh?