Tuna à la Provençale

 Recipe from chef patrick

Ingredients :
Tuna 'à la Provençale' (recipe from the Provence region, for 4 persons) :

4 nice slices of fresh tuna (half a pound each)
50 grams of anchovy filets preserved in olive oil
1 bayleaf
3 grams of thyme flowers
a few fresh leaves of mint
1 thinly chopped onion
the juice of 1 lemon
2 crushed then chopped cloves of garlic (remove the germs)
200 grams of peeled roughly chopped tomatoes
2/10 liter olive oil
1/10 liter of dry white wine
table salt and freshly ground black pepper

Direction :
1 hour before the meal :
Put you fish slices on a large dish, season them with salt and pepper then with a small sharp knife, make a few not deep notches and put in each of them a small piece of anchovy file.
Sprinkle with thyme, put 1/4 of the bayleaf on each slice of fish, sprinkle the lemon juice on them, put a clingfilm (saran wrap) on the dish and keep it during 1 hour in the fridge.

Then heat the olive oil in a casserole dish, brown the fish on both sides and take it off the casserole onto a plate.
In the same casserole, brown the onion then add the garlic, tomatoes and then the wine. Make it boiling and put into the casserole the fish with care.
Slow down the heat and let the fish cook during 15 minutes with a lid on the casserole, checking that the fish and the sauce do not stick on the bottom of the casserole.
Then get rid of the central fish bone and of the skin of each fish slice and serve the fish and the sauce on the fish and some (few) chopped mint leaves on the sauce in individual dishes.
To go with it, prepare separatly zucchinis panned in loive oil with garlic and a nice coll rosé wine from Bandol : this is PROVENCE !