Why Your Refrigerator Is Actually The Best Place To Store Canned Tuna

Canned tuna is one of the best types of fish you can have in your home. Although it isn't always viewed favorably compared to fresh fish, it actually has plenty of nutritional benefits, is a cost-effective seafood option, and lasts a long time (and it's hard to find any seafood that meets all of these requirements). When you buy canned tuna, it's stored on the shelf, but that doesn't mean it has to stay there. If you have a can of tuna sitting in your pantry, you should put it in the refrigerator.

Most dishes that involve canned tuna should be served cold or chilled. If you make tuna salad or add some tuna to your pasta salad, you likely don't want to eat it at room temperature. By chilling the tuna, you can essentially skip the refrigeration step. It will already be cold when you prepare the dish, so it's ready to eat.

If you're buying tuna canned in water, this method is foolproof. Since you store many of the other ingredients for tuna salad in the refrigerator as well — such as mayonnaise, relish, and celery — unrefrigerated tuna would be the only thing that keeps the dish at room temperature. But not if you take this piece of advice and keep it in the fridge. This way, everything is already cold, you just have to wait for the flavors to marry together.

But there is one caveat with this tuna refrigeration trick: you should not refrigerate tuna in oil. When oil is cold, it solidifies, going from a liquid to a solid. If you keep oiled tuna in the refrigerator, you'll need to let it sit out for a little while to get that oil back to its liquid state. You could make the salad with the oil in solid form, but it generally is a little less appealing to look at.