Tuna and Massaged Kale Jars with Brown Rice and Lemon-Tahini
Kale ribbons squeezed soft with lemon and salt, layered over brown rice and a lemon-tahini dressing with flaked tuna, halved cherry tomatoes, scallions, and a heavy scatter of toasted sesame.
Why You'll Love This Recipe
Massaging kale is the step people skip, and it is the whole recipe. Raw kale in a jar on Monday is still raw kale on Wednesday, stiff and squeaking against your teeth. Two minutes of squeezing it with lemon juice and a little salt breaks down the cell walls, the volume drops by half, and the color turns a deeper green almost as you watch. After that it behaves like a cooked green that happens to be cold, and it will sit under a dressing for four days without going limp or watery. That is the trick that makes a jar salad worth building.
The dressing is tahini loosened with yogurt, lemon, and grated garlic, which gives you something creamy and bitter and sharp all at once. It goes in the bottom, the rice goes on it, and by the time you open the jar the rice has drunk most of it up. Tuna sits on top in large flakes rather than mashed, so it keeps its texture. Cherry tomatoes bleed a little into the layers, the scallions stay sharp, and the sesame seeds on the very top are dry and toasty until the moment you turn the jar over. I flake the fish into big pieces on purpose, because broken up small it disappears into the dressing and the jar ends up tasting of tahini and very little else.
I make these on Sunday night with rice cooked earlier in the week, and they are the reason I stop buying lunch on Tuesdays. Nothing here needs heating, which matters if your office kitchen is a line of people waiting on one microwave. Shake the jar hard before you open it, then eat it straight out of the glass or tip it into a bowl. The one on Thursday is a slightly different salad from the one on Monday, softer and rounder, and I have come to prefer it. If jar lunches are new to you, build the first batch on an evening when the rice is already cooked and cold, and the whole thing takes twenty minutes start to finish.
Ingredients
- Three 5-oz cans tuna in water, drained well and flaked into large pieces
- 1 large bunch lacinato kale (about 9 oz), stems stripped out, leaves sliced into thin ribbons
- 2 cups cooked brown rice, cooled
- 1/4 cup tahini, well stirred
- 2/3 cup plain Greek yogurt
- 1 1/2 cups cherry tomatoes, halved
- 3 tbsp sesame seeds, toasted
- 4 scallions, sliced thin
- 3 tbsp lemon juice, plus the zest of 1 lemon
- 1 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
- 2 garlic cloves, grated to a paste
- 1/2 tsp coarsely ground black pepper
- 1/4 tsp fine sea salt
Instructions
- Strip and slice the kale: Hold each kale stem at the thick end and pull the leaf away from it with your other hand. Stack the leaves, roll them into a loose cigar, and cut across into ribbons about a quarter inch wide. Lacinato is easiest to roll, but curly kale works if you chop it a little smaller.
- Massage it: Put the ribbons in a big bowl with the salt and a tablespoon of the lemon juice and squeeze them in both hands for a full two minutes, as though you were wringing out a cloth. They will go dark, glossy, and soft, and the pile will shrink to about half of what you started with. When a ribbon bends without snapping, it is ready.
- Toast the sesame: Put the sesame seeds in a dry skillet over medium heat and keep the pan moving for two to three minutes, until they smell nutty and take on a little color. Tip them straight onto a cold plate, because they will keep browning in the hot pan and go bitter fast.
- Make the lemon-tahini: Whisk the tahini with the yogurt, the rest of the lemon juice, the zest, the grated garlic, the olive oil, and the black pepper. It will seize and go stiff the moment the acid hits it. Keep whisking and add cold water a tablespoon at a time, up to about three, until it loosens into a smooth dressing that falls off the whisk in a ribbon.
- Layer the jars: Divide the dressing between four wide-mouth quart jars, then add the rice, then the kale, then the tomatoes, and finish with the tuna, the scallions, and the sesame seeds. Keeping the dressing at the bottom and the seeds at the top is what stops everything in between from going soggy before you get to it.
Variations
- White bean: Swap the tuna for a can of rinsed cannellini beans, folded through the kale so they sit in the dressing rather than on top.
- Herb heavy: Add a half cup each of chopped parsley and dill to the kale after massaging, which turns the whole jar green and grassy.
- Chile and cumin: Whisk a teaspoon of toasted cumin and a good pinch of cayenne into the dressing for a warmer, smokier version.
- Cucumber and mint: Trade the tomatoes for diced cucumber and a handful of torn mint, which makes a cooler jar for the middle of summer.
Storage & Leftovers
Sealed and cold, these hold four days, and the kale is the reason. Massaged greens keep improving for a couple of days where lettuce would have turned to slime, and the rice slowly takes on the dressing so the bottom of the jar gets better rather than worse.
If you are packing all four at once, add the tomatoes on the morning you plan to eat each jar rather than on Sunday. They give up juice as they sit, which thins the dressing and softens the sesame. Everything else can be built days ahead.
Freezing does not work here. The tomatoes collapse, the yogurt in the dressing splits into grain and water, and the kale that you worked so hard to keep supple comes out slack. Make these to live in the refrigerator for the week you are in.
Notes & Tips
- Squeeze the kale longer than you think: Thirty seconds gets you bruised kale. Two full minutes gets you kale that eats like a cooked green, and the color tells you when you are there.
- Drain the tuna twice: Press the lid down, pour off the water, then tip the tuna onto a paper towel for a minute. Wet tuna waters down the dressing overnight.
- Cool the rice completely: Warm rice steams inside a sealed jar and makes everything above it damp. Spread it on a sheet pan for fifteen minutes before it goes anywhere near the glass.
- Build wet to dry, bottom to top: Dressing, grain, greens, then the fragile things. It is the whole logic of a jar salad, and it is why the sesame is still crisp on day four.
Nutrition & Mindful Eating
- Tuna, tahini, kale, and brown rice are each carrying a different part of this jar. The tuna is the protein, the tahini and sesame are where most of the calcium comes from, the kale gives it bulk and color, and the rice underneath is what turns a salad into lunch.
- Canned tuna is one of the easiest ways to put real protein in a lunch you built on a Sunday, and the flakes hold their shape in a dressing rather than dissolving into it. Keeping them in large pieces on top means you taste fish rather than paste.
- Tahini is ground sesame and nothing else, which is why a quarter cup of it brings both the calcium and the faint bitterness that makes this dressing taste like something rather than like plain yogurt. Whisked with lemon it turns pale and thick.
- Kale ribbons that have been squeezed with lemon and salt eat like a cooked green while staying cold, and they hold their fiber and their deep color through several days in the refrigerator, which is the whole reason this jar works.
- Toasted sesame on top, sharp scallion, and cherry tomatoes that burst against the rice keep every layer tasting like itself. A jar this full of grain and fish holds you through a long afternoon, and the protein and the fiber together are what do that.
- As you eat, notice the difference between the dry toasted sesame at the top and the rice at the bottom that has been sitting in the dressing all morning, and slow down enough to taste both rather than shaking the jar and eating it standing up.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I use tuna packed in olive oil?
Yes, and it is richer and softer in the jar. Drain it properly and cut the olive oil in the dressing back to a teaspoon so the tahini does not slide off the kale. Sardines or salmon from a tin work the same way if you would rather.
My tahini turned into cement. Is it ruined?
Not at all, and it happens to everyone. Tahini seizes when acid hits it, and the fix is water, added a spoonful at a time while you whisk hard. It will go from a paste to a lumpy mess to a smooth cream in about a minute of whisking.
Can I use another grain?
Farro, barley, and quinoa all hold up well and take the dressing the same way. Cook whichever you use a minute past where you would want it for dinner, since a cold grain firms up in the refrigerator and a slightly softer one eats better out of a jar.
How long does massaged kale actually keep?
About five days on its own in a sealed container, which is longer than most people expect. Massage a double batch on Sunday and you have the base of a salad ready to go, halfway to lunch before you have started.