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Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia · Volume 10, The Atoll, the Pit and the Palm

Marshall Islands style raw tuna

Springdale, Arkansas and Majuro

Marshall Islands style raw tuna in mayonnaise, soy and lime: cubed raw tuna glossy with a pale creamy dressing, flecked with thin slices of onion, in a plain dark bowl on a dark wooden board.

Illustration

Jojo's Island Foods, a real, currently listed Marshallese restaurant in Springdale, Arkansas, the town holding the largest Marshallese population outside the RMI itself, serves whole reef fish grilled or fried, reef fish in kalal (a coconut soup), and a raw sashimi tuna dressed in mayonnaise, soy sauce, onion and lime. SinglePlatform menu, Jojo's Island Foods This sits inside the same wider Pacific family of citrus-and-coconut cured raw fish as Fiji's kokoda, Tahiti's poisson cru and Tonga's ʻota ʻika, but its particular dressing, built on mayonnaise and soy alongside the lime, reflects a genuinely mixed twentieth century Marshallese-American pantry rather than a single ancestral recipe. It is included here specifically because it is a real dish, served today, at a named restaurant.

As tradition built it

As served at Jojo's Island Foods

Reported method rather than a precisely quantified recipe; no source consulted gave gram weights or exact ratios.

Ingredients

The tradition's method, with the ingredients named. Quantities follow as we verify them.

  • sashimi-grade tuna, cut into bite-sized pieces
  • to taste mayonnaise
  • to taste soy sauce
  • onion, thinly sliced
  • to taste lime juice, a generous amount

Method

  1. Cut sashimi-grade tuna into bite-sized pieces.
  2. Dress with mayonnaise, soy sauce, thinly sliced onion and a generous amount of lime juice.
  3. Toss to coat evenly and serve immediately, chilled.

What a modern chef changes

The citrus cure separated from the dressing, and coconut brought in as its own layer

Method

  1. **Cure the tuna briefly in lime juice alone before dressing**, rather than combining citrus and dressing in one step, giving the fish a genuine, timed cure rather than a wet toss, then drain before finishing.
  2. **Build the dressing as a coconut cream emulsion with soy and a little mayonnaise worked through it**, rather than mayonnaise as the base, bringing the dish closer to the coconut-forward grammar the rest of this volume runs on while keeping the soy and lime that make Jojo's version genuinely its own.
  3. **Finish with a dehydrator-crisped shard of coconut flesh**, a texture this chapter adds on its own account, not a documented traditional element, offered plainly as such.
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