Instructions: Try The `Au Poivre Treatment, By Mark Bittman, New York Times

For many home cooks, tuna involves a quick soak in soy sauce and ginger, followed by a visit to the grill. There is nothing wrong with that, but tuna takes equally well to the skillet. At the top of my list for tuna steak possibilities is tuna au poivre, a recipe that plays on tunas similarity to beefsteak.

The recipe is simple: Coat the tuna with crushed black pepper and sear on both sides until it is done. But it can take on a more elegant air if you finish it with a reduction sauce. That sauce, which you can prepare while the tuna finishes cooking in the oven, can be based on almost any liquid. I like red wine or cream. To make it, cook some shallots for a moment in butter or oil, add the wine or cream and then pour it on the finished tuna.

Of eight common species of tuna (bigeye, blackfin, albacore, yellowfin, bluefin, bonito, skipjack and little tunny), bluefin is by far the fattiest and the best for eating. It is also the most difficult to find, and the Monterey Bay Aquariums Seafood Watch program lists it as a food to avoid, because of endangerment. Supermarkets most frequently sell the paler albacore and skipjack, which are extremely lean and not especially flavorful. Yellowfin, most often found in good fish stores and restaurants, is worth seeking out.

That freshly ground black pepper is better than preground pepper is a given.

But the uninitiated might ask, How finely should it be ground, and is a variety of peppers better than plain black? The second question is the easier one to answer. I played with green, white, pink and Sichuan peppercorns and could discern no difference among them.

How fine to grind the pepper is a matter of taste. The coarser the grind, the more powerful the taste.

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