Ahi Poke

I've been experimenting with Ahi Poke lately(no comments GWIV). Don't have any good recipes in my cookbooks and haven't found anything great on the web(Epicurius,TVFoodNetwork,etc.). Can anyone be of help out there?

I was in Hawaii in January, came back, and made a reasonable version of poke by marinating the fish for about an hour in soy sauce and a little toasted sesame oil, sprinkled with lightly toasted sesame seeds and some crumbled nori. Seemed to be pretty close to what I remembered, and very easy and quick.

Edited to clarify - crumbled nori - not crumpled as originally posted

nr706 wrote:I was in Hawaii in January, came back, and made a reasonable version of poke by marinating the fish for about an hour in soy sauce and a little toasted sesame oil, sprinkled with lightly toasted sesame seeds and some crumpled nori. Seemed to be pretty close to what I remembered, and very easy and quick.

That sounds about right to me, too, although I would use some finely sliced green onion and maybe not the sesame seeds. If you want it spicier, you can add red pepper flakes. I think of it as a simple, yet somewhat elastic dish. It's become a trendy dish and people add a lot of different stuff but I don't think you want too many ingredients.

Pink Hawaiian "alaea" salt is very good on poke, and some of the alaea salt blends with herbs and species are not bad either. The stuff is fairly reasonably priced in Hawaii and is one of the few designer salts I keep around. The pink color just sparkles on seafood.

It probably goes without saying, but the higher the quality of ahi, the better it will work. If I'm going to serve ahi raw or marinated, I get the sashimi-grade ahi from a Japanese market because the texture is so important. It should be velvety.

Take a peak at this Saveur recipe:

Saveur's Poke

There is a great article that it was taken from called "Real Hawaii"--the recipe links back to the article. I find Saveur recipes are generally pretty good at recreating authentic flavors.

Have some packets of poke mix from HI. PM me your mailing address and I'd be happy to send you one.

FWIW, Mitsuwa sells already cubed ahi at a discount to the whole pcs. To easy to just buy and mix.

Poke @ Mā'ona.

Erik M.