Tuna Pasta Bake
The tuna goes in at the end, folded through rather than baked into the sauce. Twenty-five minutes in the oven turns it into dry threads.
- Prep
- 15 min
- Cook
- 45 min
- Resting
- 5 min
- Total
- 1 hr 5 min
- Serves
- 4
- Revisions
- 1
Allergens
- Cereals containing gluten
- Fish
- Milk
- Mustard
Named from the ingredients as written, including those carried in from sub-recipes. This is not a guarantee — check the labels on what you actually buy, and note that a product’s recipe can change.
Ingredients
Serves
Pasta
Sauce
To finish
Topping
Method
Pasta
Heat the oven to 200C fan and boil the pasta 3 minutes short of the packet time.
Sauce
Melt the butter in a large pan and cook the onion over medium heat for 8 minutes until soft.
Stir in the flour and cook for 2 minutes until it smells biscuity.
Off the heat, beat in the warm milk a third at a time until smooth.
Return to the heat and cook, stirring, for 8 minutes, until thick enough to coat a spoon.
Take it off the heat, let it stop steaming, and stir in the 150g of Cheddar with the mustard and salt.
To finish
Drain the tuna properly, pressing it in the tin. Wet tuna dilutes the sauce and makes the bake watery underneath.
Fold the drained pasta, the sweetcorn, the peas and the lemon zest into the sauce.
Add the tuna last and fold it through in large flakes, turning as little as possible.
It goes in whole and late on purpose. Tuna is already cooked, and stirring it into a hot sauce and then baking it breaks it into dry threads that taste of nothing.
Topping
Tip into a 2.5 litre dish and scatter over the topping cheese and breadcrumbs.
Bake for 22 to 25 minutes, until golden and bubbling at the edges.
Rest for 5 minutes before serving.
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What to expect
- Taste
Mild and savoury, with the mustard and lemon doing the work of stopping it being flat. Tuna is a quiet flavour and the dish is built around that rather than against it.
- Aroma
Toasted cheese and crumb. The tuna itself is barely detectable in the smell, which is a good sign.
- Texture
Soft throughout with a crisp top, and the tuna giving occasional larger, firmer flakes. The failure is uniformity.
- Sound
The crumb cracking under a spoon.
- How the flavour moves
Crumb and cheese first, then a mild creamy body, then a lift of lemon at the end.
- Serve it
Very hot in the middle; rest it.
- Goes with
A sharp green salad, or peas. Something acidic is welcome.
Cook's notes
- Difficulty
Beginner.
- Cost
Very low, and almost entirely from a cupboard.
- Equipment
A large pan, a whisk and a 2.5 litre dish.
- When to make it
A weeknight, from the cupboard.
- Best season
None.
- You know it is done when
Golden top, sauce bubbling at the edges.
- And it feels like
Sauce just set, pasta with a little bite, and tuna still in visible flakes rather than dispersed through the sauce.
- Food safety
Everything in this is either cooked or canned. Cool leftovers within two hours.
- Where it goes wrong
- Stirring the tuna into the hot sauce and then baking it, which shreds it.
- Not draining the tin properly, which waters the sauce down.
- Cheese into a sauce still on the heat, which goes grainy.
- Boiling the pasta to the packet time, so it is swollen after the bake.
- No acid anywhere, which is why the standard version is bland.
- If it does go wrong
Watery at the bottom: the tuna was wet. Bland: salt, mustard and lemon, in that order. Dry: it needed more sauce; 700ml of milk for 350g of pasta is already generous, so check the béchamel was not over-reduced. Grainy sauce: it was too hot when the cheese went in.
- Making it ahead
Assemble a day ahead unbaked.
- Keeping it
Two days in the fridge.
- Reheating
Covered at 180C fan for 25 minutes with a splash of milk.
- Freezing
Freezes assembled and unbaked for two months.
- Leftovers
Fried in slabs until the outside crisps.
- Scaling it
Doubles cleanly in a wider dish.
- Substitutions
Tinned salmon works. Any short pasta. Gluten-free pasta and gluten-free flour both work here, with the flour needing an extra two minutes of cooking.
- Dietary swaps
Contains gluten, milk, fish and mustard. Pescatarian. Egg free and nut free as written.
- Shopping for it
Skipjack rather than yellowfin or bigeye, and pole-and-line or FAD-free on the label. Both matter more than the brand.
- Keeping the cost down
Already among the cheapest meals here.
- Sustainability
This is the one dish here where the ingredient choice genuinely matters and the answer is not obvious. Skipjack is the most abundant tuna and most stocks of it are in reasonable shape; yellowfin and especially bigeye are under far more pressure, and bluefin should not be in a pasta bake or anywhere else. The fishing method matters as much as the species: purse-seining with fish aggregating devices takes large quantities of juvenile tuna and other species as bycatch, while pole-and-line and FAD-free purse-seining take far less. Look for the species and the method on the tin — both are usually printed — rather than for a general reassurance on the front.
- Nutrition
Decent protein and a good amount of vegetable if the peas and corn go in. The sauce carries the fat.
- Worth it?
Drain it hard and fold it in last. Two seconds of care and the tuna stays tuna.
Where it comes from
- Origin
Britain, twentieth century.
- Also called
Tuna pasta bake.
- Said out loud
Straightforward.
- What the name means
Descriptive.
- History
The dish exists because of the tin. Commercial canning made fish cheap, shelf-stable and universal, and by the middle of the twentieth century tinned tuna was a fixture of British and American cupboards. The American tuna noodle casserole, usually built on tinned condensed soup, is the close cousin; the British version tends to use a béchamel made from scratch, which is what this recipe does.
- Why it matters
Firmly domestic. It is one of the dishes most people learn to cook early and few write down.
- When it is eaten
A weeknight, a school holiday, a cupboard with nothing fresh in it.
- The traditional way
Béchamel, folded through pasta and baked with a topping.
- How it changed
The American branch moved to tinned soup as a shortcut; the British one largely did not.
- Regional variations
The American tuna noodle casserole uses condensed mushroom soup and often crushed crisps or fried onions on top.
- How this version differs
The tuna goes in last and undisturbed, which most recipes do not specify, and the lemon zest is in the mixture. Both are small and both change the result.
- Sources and credit
None.
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