In recent years, pouched tuna has appeared in supermarkets, promising a fresher, less processed, better-tasting alternative to canned tuna. But is pouched tuna really better than its canned cousin?

A preliminary tasting showed that tasters had a strong preference for solid white albacore tuna packed in water, which is the mildest variety of processed tuna; chunk light tuna had unappealing strong flavors, and albacore packed in oil was too mushy. We rounded up the top five national brands of canned albacore tuna in water and tasted them blind against three pouched water-packed albacore products.

The results were, in a word (no, not fishy), startling. Out of the eight tunas sampled, tasters chose two canned products as their overall favorites; in fact, canned tunas took four of the top five spots.

Why didn't the pouched products, which require less processing and therefore should have fresher flavor, swim away with the lead? When it comes to tuna, more flavor is not necessarily a good thing. Our tasters preferred the milder brands (whether pouched or canned) and downgraded the one brand that was the big loser in this tasting for tasting too fishy. And given the minimal flavor differences in the mild tunas, our tasters focused on texture--and here's where the canned tunas won the race.

Because the cans are about three times as thick as the pouches (1 1/2 inches versus about half an inch), the tuna must be broken down to get it into the pouch; the cans hold larger pieces of fish. Larger pieces mean that canned tuna has larger flakes than pouched tuna. In the end, we found texture to be more variable than flavor, and meaty canned tuna was preferred to mushier pouched tuna.

See the Results