Canned Food Recipe Hacks: How to Easily Make Canned Food Good

Here are hacks and recipes on how to make canned food into something delicious for the family to eat.

When you’re too tired to defrost the meat or clean the vegetables for your family’s next meal, it’s canned food to the rescue! Although we’re worried about the sodium content, all you have to do is drain the brine. That way, you can mix other ingredients into it to make it healthier and tastier. Here are some tested hacks to make tasty and healthy canned food recipes.

Toss it in some pasta!

Pasta makes everything look fancy and it doesn’t take as long as rice to cook. With noodles cooking within 5-7 minutes, it’s easy to just boil the noodles, crack open a can of tuna, and then mix whatever you want in it. Some parents even just pop a can of mushrooms open and use the water to boil the noodles since it’s already a mixture of water and salt — perfect for boiling noodles.

With minced garlic, oil, salt, and black pepper, you have a Tuna Aglio Olio! If all-purpose cream and cheese then, you have Tuna Alfredo. Smash a few tomatoes or mix a tablespoon of tomato paste with some hot sauce and the water used to boil the pasta then, you have a spicy tuna pasta.

Tuna Alfredo

Ingredients

• 1 canned tuna in oil
• 1/4 cup of Quickmelt cheese or parmesan
• Black pepper to taste
• 100g of button mushrooms (stems and pieces) or dried shitake mushrooms
• 1 medium-sized red onion, diced
• 75g or 100g of spaghetti or fettuccine pasta

Instructions

1. Boil the pasta for 5 minutes. Don’t cook until completely al dente! Otherwise, when we mix it with the sauce, it’ll be mushy.
2. While the pasta is still cooking, start making the sauce by sauteing the tuna, mushroom, and onion on medium heat. Cook until the onion turns translucent or loses its red color.
3. Lower the heat and then add the noodles. But don’t throw the water!
4. Toss the noodles a bit with the tuna, mushroom, and onion before adding the cheese. Keep the heat on low to prevent your cheese from burning.
5. Then, take a spoon of the pasta water and pour it on the cheese. The starch will melt the cheese into the “sauce.”
6. Add black pepper and toss for 2 minutes. Then, plate and serve!

Tips/ Hacks

• Don’t waste the mushroom brine! Mix the water from the canned mushrooms (if ever you’re using canned mushrooms) with the pasta water. That way, you won’t have to add so much salt.
• Feel free to do it Filipino-style by adding some all-purpose cream.
• If you’re using dried shitake mushrooms, immerse the shitake mushrooms while boiling the noodles. That way, the noodles will absorb the shitake mushroom’s umami.

Tuna Aglio Olio

Ingredients

• 1 canned tuna in oil
• Black peppermill grind
• 1 medium-sized red onion, diced
• 1 head of garlic, minced
• 75g or 100g of spaghetti or fettuccine pasta

Instructions

1. Boil the pasta for 5 minutes. Don’t cook until completely al dente! Otherwise, when we mix it with the sauce, it’ll be mushy.
2. While the pasta is still cooking, start making the sauce by sauteing the tuna and onion on medium heat. Cook until the onion turns translucent or loses its red color.
3. Lower the heat and then add the minced garlic and noodles.
4. Add black pepper and toss for 4 minutes. Then, plate and serve!

Tips/ Hacks

• Since Aglio Olio is a versatile recipe, feel free to add some vegetables like malunggay, spinach leaves, asparagus, alfalfa sprouts, and broccoli (which they sell frozen in bags in some supermarkets) to give it a splash of color.
• Mushroom is also a good addition to give this pasta a “meatier” profile.
• For a spicy Aglio Olio, slice up one Taiwan chili and saute it with the tuna and onion. If you’re daring, feel free to even use the chili garlic from your Chinese takeout. But be careful, those things burn fast!

Tuna Pomodoro

Ingredients

• 1 canned tuna in oil
• Dried basil to taste
• 1 medium-sized red onion, diced
• 4 medium-sized tomatoes, diced
• 1 dash salt
• 75g or 100g of spaghetti or fettuccine pasta

Instructions

1. Boil the pasta for 5 minutes. Don’t cook until completely al dente! Otherwise, when we mix it with the sauce, it’ll be mushy.
2. While the pasta is still cooking, start making the sauce by sprinkling salt all over the tomatoes and then heating it. The salt will draw out the tomato juices for a richer sauce.
3. While that’s happening on one side of the pan, saute the tuna and red onion until the red onion is translucent.
4. Lower the heat and then add the noodles. But don’t throw the water!
5. Add 1/4 cup of pasta water into the pan with the sauce to “thicken” the tomato sauce. Then, toss everything in low heat. The water will also make sure nothing’s left behind on the pan!
6. Add dried basil and toss for 2 minutes. Then, plate and serve!

Tips/ Hacks

• This canned food-based pasta recipe branches out into several other tomato-based pasta recipes depending on what else you add:
  • Tuna Marinara – mince 1 head of garlic and toss with the tomatoes.
  • Tuna alla Puttanesca – add more sliced tomatoes, black olives, capers, and chili flakes.
  • Spicy Tuna Arrabbiata – mix sliced siling labuyo or Taiwan chili with the tomato. Or, cheat by using a sachet of hot sauce from our latest pizza takeout.
• Feel free to saute spinach leaves with the pasta to add an earthy profile.
• Swap the spaghetti noodles for macaroni and you can even bake it in tomato sauce and cheese to make a tuna-based baked macaroni.

Toast some bread and make canapes!

Remember those fancy little bread bites you see at weddings or events? Those are called canapes — they’re French hors d’oeuvres or appetizers that are usually served on crackers or tiny, sliced, and toasted baguettes. We don’t have to go to the nearest bakery to buy that specific bread. We can even just toast up some white bread and place the canned food on top with a bit of vegetable and cheese to make this recipe taste good!

Canape

Ingredients

• 2 slices bread
• 1/4 cup cream cheese spread
• A quarter of a cucumber, thinly sliced
• 1 teaspoon unsalted butter
• Spring onions to garnish
• 2 small canned meat of your choice
• Salt and pepper to taste

Instructions

1. Brush the butter on the slices of bread before slicing them into four equal squares.
2. Drain the liquid from the canned goods and heat it with some salt and pepper for 2 minutes.
3. Once that’s heated, toast the bread squares until golden brown.
4. Assemble in the following order: bread, cucumber, a layer of cream cheese, a bit of the canned food, and then spring onion.

Tips/ Hacks

• The fun part about this canned food recipe is that you can use any kind of meat! Tuna, chicken, luncheon meat, sliced vienna sausages, mackerel, and even bits of sardine can serve as the “protein!”

Make a salad out of it.

Wondering what protein to add to your salad? If there’s no nearby place selling roasted chicken then, canned fish is a good alternative. Mix it by adding a variety of greens like watercress, different kinds of lettuce, spinach, and basil leaves, and then choose a protein from the supermarket’s canned food section. Canned food is also available in convenience stores and they usually have sardines and tuna.

But if you’re tired of tuna or sardines, there’s also bangus, mackerel, and even canned chicken.

Tuna Caesar Salad

Ingredients

• 1 canned tuna in brine
• 1 head iceberg lettuce
• 1 bunch spinach
• 1 head romaine lettuce
• 1 bunch watercress
• 100 mL Caesar salad dressing
• Croutons (optional)
• Alfalfa sprouts (optional)

Instructions

1. Wash the vegetables well. For the lettuce, snap the base of the heads off and then wash per leaf. For the Spinach, pluck out the leaves. Watercress just needs to be chopped into smaller bite sizes.
2. Drain the tuna and then heat for 3 minutes with salt and pepper.
3. Assemble and toss with salad dressing.

Tips/ Hacks

• Keep the dressing separate if you’re not going to eat it right away. That way, the salad doesn’t look like a wilted mess by the time you get to it!
• If there’s a need for croutons or something crispy, buy a small bag of plain-flavored Bread Pan and break it into smaller pieces.
• Feel free to change up the dressing. The salad recipe is just a guide how to make it interesting.

Fried rice is the way to go!

Most canned foods come in oil and recipes need that anyway! Everyone’s favorite luncheon meat usually has fat which is technically enough oil to saute the onion and garlic for the rice and egg. Tuna also comes with oil; it even has a hot and spicy version. The best part is, we can even use whatever leftover rice is sitting in the fridge.

And if you just came from a K-Drama binge, some Korean marts sell kimchi which you can use to make Kimchi Fried Rice!

Fried Rice

Ingredients

• 1 can of luncheon meat, cubed
• Black pepper to taste
• 1 medium-sized red onion, diced
• 1 head of garlic, diced
• 1 egg
• 1 dash salt
• 1 cup leftover (at least day-old) rice
• 1 teaspoon ketchup (optional)

Instructions

1. Heat the pan for 3 minutes before searing the luncheon meat.
2. Using the oil from the luncheon meat, fry the egg, onion, and garlic. Feel free to scramble it if you’re not in the mood for yolks.
3. Once the egg looks “creamy,” add the rice and start tossing.
4. Mix the luncheon meat. Toss on medium heat for 2 minutes.
5. Then, plate and serve.

Tips/ Hacks

• Feel free to use tuna if there’s your favorite brand of luncheon meat isn’t available.
• Upgrade this into Kimchi Fried Rice by slicing up the kimchi and sauteing it using the oil from the luncheon meat. Add a dollop of gojuchang if you want to heat things up.
• If red onions aren’t available, use the whites of leek instead. The greens can even go on top as garnish.

Other hacks to make sure these canned food recipes stay healthy!

The biggest complaint anybody has about canned food is the sodium content. The large amount of salt raises blood pressure and causes all sorts of health problems. What some parents do is drain it completely and then even boil it a bit in water to remove as much salt as they can. They also avoid using oil since these canned goods are usually preserved in oil. Cooking it in more oil just makes it taste oily.

Canned fish usually has a fishy smell and to counter that, squeezing a bit of calamansi and adding some salt and pepper will do the trick.

It’s not healthy to eat canned food everyday. But there are days you might forget to defrost meat for meals because you’re tired or work’s just too demanding. With canned food, at least your protein is cooked half-way so all we have to do is add some spice to it to make it healthier.

More recipes and hacks?

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