When it comes to flavor, canned tuna is no wallflower. 

It’s bold, rich, salty presence is what makes it possible to simply add a bit of celery and some mayonnaise and end up with a perfectly adequate sandwich spread. 

But because tuna brings so much to the table, you can add a host of very bold ingredients to create a salad that packs a mighty delicious punch, a salad that doesn't need any bread but can be eaten by the bowl-full. 

For this, I turn to the amazing array of available pickled products to beef up my tuna, always adding something sweet, something sour and something hot, choosing ingredients that will not turn to mush as the salad sits. 

For the sweet, I like sweet gherkins, pickled beets, jardinière – a collection of garden vegetables that can include cauliflower, onions, carrots, zucchini – pickled Brussels sprouts, chow chow, anything you like that brings that intense, vinegary-sweet pickle flavor. 

Many of these same ingredients – the gherkins, jardinière, Brussels sprouts and chow chow - are usually also available in dill versions, but I prefer looking to olives for that sour, even bitter, note. I like green olives in particular, but I’ve also used those tiny little French cornichons to good effect. I also like the idea of some chopped dilly beans or pickled green tomatoes. 

The heat is perhaps the easiest choice, with so many pickled peppers available, from cherry to jalapenos. I love the sweet heat of banana peppers, but their relatively mild flavor can get lost in the tuna, so for this application I turn to pepperoncini. For the mildest effect, remove the stems and seeds and finely dice them. For a bigger hit, use the core and seeds, and slice the pepper into rings. 

But these days, regardless of its flavor potential, no canned tuna discussion is complete without a word of caution. Recent findings of high levels of mercury in canned tuna leave more than a bad taste in the mouth. Depending on what you read, you can easily justify opposing positions: eliminating it from your diet all together, as well as eating it just as you did before knowing its dangers. 

It seems though that everyone from the Food and Drug Administration to Consumer Reports to the Environmental Defense Fund agrees on two things: pregnant women and young children must limit their intake of canned, solid white tuna or risk the affect mercury can have on a developing nervous system, lungs and kidneys. And tuna labeled “light” instead of “white” contains less mercury on average. 

I recommend that you do your own research and use your own judgment to decide how much and what kind of tuna to eat yourself and to feed your family. 

Be careful, and enjoy!

Pickle-licious Tuna Salad 

1 12-ounce can of the tuna of your choice, packed in water 

2 tablespoons finely diced red onion 

Generous ¼ cup coarsely chopped pimento-stuffed green olives 

Generous ¼ cup coarsely chopped sweet gherkin pickles 

1 heaping tablespoon finely diced pepperoncini (use the seeds or leave them out to regulate the heat) 

¼ cup mayonnaise, more or less to taste 

Open the can of tuna and drain well, pressing to extract as much of the water as possible. 

Put the tuna in a medium-size mixing bowl and, using a fork, break apart the large chunks, reducing them to flakes, as small as you like. 

Add the remaining ingredients, stir, and try not to eat it all before you get it into the refrigerator. 

Jill Blanchette is the multiplatform production manager at The Day. Share comments and recipes with her at j.blanchette@theday.com.