All about tuna

One does not argue with Nature. Nature cares not for what you feel or think. The best you can do is try to understand it, maybe even learn from it, like scientists have been doing for centuries. The alternative is frustration.

At the height of the tuna glut last month, I decided to make the most of the situation. My father is very choosy when it comes to seafood, so when I tell him I could not find any fish at the market, what it most often means is that whatever fish happen to be available that day are not the sort he goes for. As a result, I do not always bother to learn about those I know he does not fancy. Or at least fancy fresh, because he loves canned tuna (our pantry is permanently stocked with his brands of choice). Still, for something that I like, I must confess I am not really adept at telling one species of tuna from another. What better time to learn?

Caveats. Common fish names vary from place to place. Too, the Internet is packed with information, a fair amount of it inaccurate. Needless to say, it was my main source of information for this article. As for the photos, most were taken under less than ideal lighting conditions, often with blue light (favored by market vendors to make fish look their freshest).

We start with mackerel tuna (Euthynnus affinis), which I was dismayed to discover I had been wrongly referring to as skipjack all this time. Locally, mangkô (or tulingan to Tagalogs; great fried, broiled, or poached in vinegar, also as kinilaw (raw in vinegar), tinapá (smoked), or tinabál (preserved in salt). An identifying mark is the series of broken diagonal lines on its upper back.

Of this species of tuna, some make the distinction between lapad (flat) and budburon/lingin (roundish, as in the above photo), the latter being favored. Is it really any better? Here I bow to conventional wisdom.

And then there’s the pirít (bullet tuna), which I had thought all along to be young mangkô (they look very much alike, I had to double-check I was not using photos of the same species taken from different angles; see topmost photo). Growing to no longer than 20 inches, pirít is a different subspecies, Auxis rochei rochei.

A close (if way bigger) cousin of pirít is patikán (frigate tuna, Auxis thazard thazard). It looks a lot like mangkô, too. Can you spot the difference? This one has no streaks across the belly.

Speaking of belly streaks, they are what give skipjack tuna away:

Bulis (Euthynnus pelamis) is, according to Wikipedia, “most fecund of the commercial tunas, and its population is considered sustainable against its current consumption.” I am glad to hear that because it is the tuna used to make katsuobushi (bonito flakes), the central ingredient in dashi. Skipjack is dark-meat tuna, which is why it is often described as “dugo-on” (literally, “bloody”).

But if skipjack is bulis, what is bluefin tuna? Well, that’s bulis, too. Thunnus orientalis is one of the largest tuna species, and along with yellowfin tuna comprise the true tunas (the others are described as “tuna-like”). However, its fins are not necessarily blue (can also be yellow, red, or brown). Also, its stripes are white, vertical, broken, and more faint, as in the yellowfin tunas below.

Or are they, in fact, bigeye tunas (Thunnus obesus)? My companions at the market that day agreed with my observation that these tunas looked quite young. Yellowfin (Thunnus albacares) and bigeye (both called bariles) have longer pectoral fins than bluefin and skipjack, but the anal and dorsal fins are pronouncedly elongated in adult yellowfin, below.

Bluefin and yellowfin tunas are popular among lovers of Japanese food as sashimi and sushi. Otoro, the fattiest part of the belly, is especially prized, thus the most expensive. But did you know that the Japanese themselves did not develop a taste for tuna until around the 1970s? Apparently, some purists still scoff at tuna as “inferior meat.”

Finally, there’s bungkalisan (I’m guessing Sarda orientalis or Pacific bonito). The kind pictured here have horizontal stripes across the upper back, but I gather that some from the same species have diagonal stripes. Its meat is light, if a tad mushy for me.

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It took some time to compile this post. In the process, I discovered that my friends were not as knowledgeable about tuna as I thought they were, making the exercise worthwhile. Still, I would be better off knowing none of it if Pa just had more enthusiasm for the damn fish fresh instead of in a can.