I Always Skip This Ingredient When I Make Tuna Salad—Here’s What I Use Instead

Tuna salad is a staple lunch for me. Canned tuna is easy to prepare, affordable, and a convenient option if, like me, you don’t eat meat. There’s just one problem with tuna salad: I’m not sold on the celery.

Sure, celery is fine, but it’s earthy, bitter, and unremarkable. I find it strange that it’s a default ingredient in tuna salad when so many other delicious things could be included. I finally realized that buying celery and chopping it up to include in my tuna salad wasn’t worth it for me anymore. However, my celery-free tuna salad was missing something.

What I Use In Tuna Salad Instead of Celery

Once I had stopped bothering to include celery in my recipe, I accidentally discovered the perfect replacement. Recently, I wrote about Ina Garten’s ricotta bruschetta and afterward found myself with an abundance of green onions left over in my fridge.

I knew if I didn’t make an active effort to use them up, in a week I’d be throwing out rotting green onions with a sigh of defeat for letting them go to waste. That’s how I discovered that green onions are the perfect replacement for celery in tuna salad.

Green onions add complexity to the tuna’s flavor profile and replace the fresh green color in the salad that you lose when you get rid of the celery. The onions’ sharpness also compliments the tuna’s saltiness and fishiness. The combination makes sense since fish and scallions are paired together in other dishes, like in tuna-scallion rolls or teriyaki salmon garnished with green onions.  

How I Make Tuna Salad With Green Onions

You can use the green and white parts of the onion for this swap, the green for color and the white for crunch. As with celery, the onions can be cut into small or large pieces, depending on your preference.

Once they’re cut up, simply mix them in with the rest of your tuna salad ingredients. I recommend using white canned tuna packed in water or oil. I keep my recipe simple, adding mayonnaise, lemon juice, and salt. I love serving my tuna salad on crunchy sourdough toast, topped with arugula and spinach, fresh tomato slices, and sun-dried tomatoes.