Poke

I had a pretty good and well filled poke bowl from Undercover in Amsterdam. I decided to deconstruct this dish and learn its origin. Poke is simply Hawaiian for "to slice" and the current dish originates in the 1970s but I’m sure traditionally a similar dish goes back much further in time.

A recipe for ahi (yellowfin tuna) poke:

Cut the tuna in bite sized cubes. Cut a spring onion and some sweet onion really thin. Add finely cut ginger, fresh ogo seaweed, and fresh chopped garlic, salt, sesame oil, soy sauce and a little vegetable oil. Mix. Traditionally you need something crunchy as well, like candlenut.

This is just the tuna. You can make sushi rice with rice vinegar as a base. My poke from Undercover was much more refined without onions, but with two types of raw fish, avocado, some leafs, fish roe and sesame seeds.

On the fish market in Tokyo they served a similar dish made from just rice and tuna. The price difference between the bowls is the fattiness of the tuna.