Disney Recipe Challenge: Tuna Burgers from Chicken of the Sea Pirate Ship (Disneyland)

Today’s recipe is a blast from the past; in fact, it’s from so far in the past that I wasn’t born before the restaurant was demolished during the Fantasyland remodel of 1982.  The Chicken of the Sea Pirate Ship was one of the most unique dining experiences in the Disneyland park, whether under its original Chicken of the Sea sponsorship or after when it became Captain Hook’s Pirate Gallery.  I mean, just look at the pictures from Yesterland.com :

A 1969 photo of the Chicken of the Sea Pirate Ship from Yesterland.com

How cool would it be to eat your tuna in a giant pirate ship or explore a life-size replica of Skull Rock from the Peter Pan movie?  Pretty darn cool.  I always found canned tuna to be rather boring, but canned tuna served in Captain Hook’s ship?  Pure awesome.  So how does it hold up in a kitchen instead of a pirate ship?  

The Recipe 

(copied directly from Chef Mickey Treasures from the Vault, page 87)

Ingredients:

1 (9 ounce) can tuna

1 tablespoon chopped onion

¼ cup chopped celery

1 teaspoon lemon juice

4 tablespoons mayonnaise, divided

2 tablespoons ketchup

Sweet pickle slices, to taste

4 unsliced hamburger buns

Directions:

Serves 4

1. Preheat oven to 375ºF.
2. Combine tuna, onion, celery, lemon juice, and 2 tablespoons mayonnaise in a medium bowl; set aside.
3. Combine remaining 2 tablespoons of mayonnaise and ketchup in a small bowl; set aside.
4. Slice bun horizontally into 3 equal slices.  Spread bottom layer with mayonnaise-ketchup mixture, then top with sweet pickle slices.  Make a double decker with middle bun slice and tuna.  Repeat for remaining sandwiches.  Wrap in aluminum foil and bake for 15 minutes.  Serve hot.

Step 1: The Set Up

It figures that even with the simplest recipe I could find I would still be missing key ingredients.  To the store! 

Things were going OK until I got to the tuna aisle.  There are no 9 oz. cans of tuna.  Sizes must have changed between 1959 and 2012, shrinking in ounces but rising in price.  Figures.  Two cans into the cart.  My family hates mayonnaise, so I got Miracle Whip instead.  While I am trying to follow the recipe as exactly as possible, I doubt Miracle Whip will change the taste too much and it saves roughly 70 calories.

Also, unsliced hamburger buns?  Were these special ordered for Disneyland?  I walked up and down the bread aisle at my local Winco three times, and all I could find were pre-sliced.  They would have to do.

Step 2: The Execution 

The ingredients are assembled, now it's just a matter of cooking.  While preheating the oven, I start chopping.  For my birthday last month, I bought myself something I had always wanted:  a food processor.  No really.  And it's purple.  It's like it was made specifically for me.  It has nothing to do with the recipe, but look at that beauty:

That is a gorgeous food processor, yes it is.

 So I have my ingredients chopped and ready to go thanks to my new toy.  Next, the tuna, Miracle Whip, lemon juice, and chopped celery and onion all get thrown in a large bowl.  Mix together and I'm halfway done already.  I purposely picked an easy recipe, but this might be too easy.  

Pre-mixed...

Mixed!  I had some leftover spinach and ground flax seed that I mixed into the bowl on the left.  Healthier, but rather disgusting looking.

Step 3 involves mixing ketchup and Miracle Whip to more or less make Thousand Island dressing.  It's Special Sauce!

The fourth and final step is tricky.  The sandwich, as written, is a pseudo triple decker, but as I mentioned above I couldn't find unsliced buns.  My solution was to take a sharp knife and slice the top bun in half.  It worked about as well as you might expect:

No, you shouldn't be able to read the pickle jar label through the bread slice...

The bottom layer of bread gets the Special Sauce, and then pickle slices are arranged on top.  I was later told by my taste testers that I put too many pickles on, so you may want to go easy.  Pickle slices are a bit less strong than the whole sweet pickles I used, so that may help ease the overbearing pickle taste.

Hidden Mickey!

Middle bun goes next, then tuna, then the top slice with more Special Sauce slathered on it.  Wrap in aluminum foil and bake.  Be careful when you unwrap the foil as it is hot.  And you're done!

The one on the right has the spinach.  It's not quite as disgustingly green as I had thought.

 Step 3: The Verdict

This is not a burger.  These are tuna salad sandwiches.  They tasted good.  Not spectacular, and perhaps not very memorable, but good.  They'd even make a solid dinner choice for busy parents.  But they are not burgers.  Maybe if the tuna had more of a binding ingredient mixed in, where you could take it to a skillet and brown it into a patty of some sort.  It's too bad too because it's a sturdy little recipe that you can alter easily (such as adding leftover spinach and flax seed) and makes an affordable, tasty lunch.

But they are not burgers...

I just can't get over it.  I'm a self-proclaimed word enthusiast, Disney, and this usage bothers me.  At first, I wondered if I made a mistake somewhere, but after checking out other blogs, such as this entry from Kevin Kidney, theirs look pretty much the same.

Perhaps it's nostalgia speaking, but I think they need the pirate ship.  I bet if I were eating there, on the water imagining myself in Neverland sword fighting Captain Hook, I would even be able to ignore the non-burger quality of this otherwise good lunch.

Next up:  More Disney Recipes!  My poor, poor kitchen--things will get messy.