StarKist Tuna Creations BOLD Thai Chili Style

Thai Chili Style. My tuna is so eclectic.

Portland is positively festooned with a variety of Thai restaurants, so I have a bit more experience with Thai food than I do with Korean food (for those not following along, Spicy Korean tuna was also reviewed).

For a long time, I lived about 500 feet from a very decent Thai restaurant that was open at wildly illogical hours. Basically when everything else closed, on went their little neon window sign as though they somehow sensed they were my only option. This place always asked how spicy I wanted every single dish. So because I’m an idiot and was frequently hungover, I’d ask for whatever I ordered progressively spicer over time until one day, because again – I’m an idiot – I just said, “Make it as spicy as you can make it.”

To this day it was still probably the spiciest thing I’ve ever put near my face. Punishment for my hubris was swift and long-lasting. I have utterly no idea what kind of wizards they had in the kitchen. I’m amazed it didn’t melt right through my tooth enamel.

Aren’t these stories great? You get to know more about how mundane my life is (joy!) and you get to add to the list of things you don’t want in your mouth (squee!) Well, it’s 9:13 AM and that’s tuna time.

Texture: This will be short. This tuna refused to actually come out of the pouch and it had to be rolled up and sort of “milked” out. Think toothpaste. Hold the thought. Got it? Now add fish.

Smell: I thought at first I’d gone nose blind. It doesn’t smell like a whole lot. A hint of tomato? Maybe? The cats are programmed by the sound of a pouch opening now and so they come plunging at me. DaVinci is older and is guarded against past disappointment. Oni, the younger, is all high-pitched squeaks. They clearly smell something I don’t. The only comparison I can make is when I once stuck my nose in a bottle of expired organic multivitamins to see if they were still good (they weren’t).

Taste: First impression, it tastes like nothing. Then suddenly an aftertaste hits and it’s a subtly processed flavor that has never occurred in nature. You’d suspect it would be spicy. It’s not. Instead, it’s distinctly metallic, distinctly synthetic, with no other defining flavor. Not spicy nor sweet nor sour.

This tuna is flirting casually with a state of nothingness. If you happened to be in the seafood department of a particularly unclean grocery store and you took a penny out of your pocket and popped it in your mouth, you’d get close to this experience. In your case, it would cost you one wet penny. In my case, it was $1.47 on Amazon.

I see nothing on the package that would tell me that cats couldn’t eat it, but I decide to err on the side of caution and they enjoy liver-flavored Friskies treats instead. Oni was too excited and wouldn’t sit still. So, you get Oni in his natural state. Kind of blurry.

So …. StarKist Tuna Creations Thai Chili gets my lowest possible score:

1 ranch. Err. I mean 1

Tomorrow brings the promise of, uhm, more tuna. Sriracha flavor specifically.