Day 42: Tuna Poke

Where do you get the best poke in town when in Hawaii? The high end restaurant? The luau? After speaking to a few locals, my co-travelers discovered that the best place to get poke was at the grocery store. Yes, that's where the locals go. And if the locals go there, that's where the most product get moved. And that leads to freshness. Look how they sell it here, in trays, the same way we buy gelato! So many flavours, and the price is $8.99/lb. You can't even buy tuna for $8.99/lb. On the side they have raw marlin too, which I didn't get a chance to try. But avocado poke had a nice balance of textures, spicy poke was delicate enough not to ruin the tuna. The tuna, mind you, was very roughly cut and a little fibrous, but for $8.99/lb, and then served on hot rice. And sitting on the beach. Man, you can't beat that.

On Poke

Modern poke typically consists of cubed ʻahi (yellowfin tuna) sashimi marinated with sea salt, a small amount of soy sauce, inamona (roasted crushed candlenut), sesame oil, limu seaweed, and chopped chili pepper. Other variations' ingredients may include cured heʻe (octopus), other types of raw tuna, raw salmon and other kinds of sashimi, sliced or diced Maui onion, furikake, hot sauce (such as sambal olek), chopped ʻohiʻa (tomato), tobiko (flying fish roe), ogo or other types of seaweed, and garlic. The selection of condiments has been heavily influenced by Japanese and other Asian cuisines.

Native Hawaiians have always eaten poke. The traditional Hawaiian poke consists of fish that has been gutted, skinned, and deboned. It is sliced across the backbone as fillet, then served with traditional condiments such as sea salt, seaweed, and limu.

According the food historian Rachel Laudan, the present form of poke became popular around the 1970s. It used skinned, deboned, and filleted raw fish served with wasabi (Japanese green horseradish) and soy sauce. This form of poke is still common in the Hawaiian islands.