Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia · Volume 11, The Imu, the Camp and the Plate Lunch

Poke

Name: Poke
Total time: 15 min
Yield: Serves 4 as a starter
Cuisine: Hawaii
Ingredients: 500 g sashimi-grade ʻahi (yellowfin tuna), cut into 1.5 cm cubes; 2 tbsp ʻinamona (or substitute: toasted macadamia nuts, pounded with salt); 2 tbsp dried or fresh limu (ogo), rinsed if fresh; 1 tsp alaea salt, or to taste; 2 tbsp for the modern layer, if you want it: 2 tbsp soy sauce, 1 tsp sesame oil, 1 spring onion, finely sliced

Native Hawaiian, later layered with Asian-contact seasoning

Ahi poke: cubed raw ruby red tuna in a shallow bowl, seasoned with dark limu seaweed and a coarse candlenut relish, no soy sauce or sesame visible, the pre-contact salt and seaweed style.

An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.

Time: 15 minutes

Researched: Researched from 66 sources in the brief, none yet linked in the text
Reviewed: Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
Cooked: Not yet cooked and reported

Reef fish, most often ʻahi, cut into cubes and seasoned with paʻakai, ʻinamona and limu, no citrus, no soy, in its pre-contact and early-contact form. The now-familiar soy-sesame-scallion version is a later, Asian-contact layering on top of that base, not a corruption of it. Genuinely contested and stated plainly rather than smoothed over: some secondary press coverage of the 2010s mainland poke boom suggests "poke" as a fixed, named dish may not appear in Hawaiian dictionaries until the 1970s, which would complicate a simple unbroken-tradition story; this chapter could not verify that claim against a primary dictionary source, and flags it as unresolved rather than asserting it.

by Native Hawaiian, later layered with Asian-contact seasoning

None of this is closed history. In 2002 the University of Hawaii's own College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources patented three varieties of Hawaiian taro and began genetically engineering them without Native Hawaiian consultation; sustained protest, led in part by Native rights activist Walter Ritte Jr., forced UH to drop the patents in 2006, and both a Hawaii County ban on GMO taro and coffee and a state "Taro Security Bill" followed. In 1973, the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled in McBryde Sugar Co. v. Robinson that private ownership of water was never actually conveyed by the Māhele's land grants and that the state holds it in trust for the common good, a ruling that has since enabled real streamflow-restoration cases brought by generational kalo farmers in East Maui. And in 2018, a Chicago chain that had trademarked the words "aloha" and "poke" sent cease-and-desist letters to small businesses using the same two words, including to a Native Hawaiian woman running a poke shop in Anchorage, Alaska, provoking a genuine, public Native Hawaiian backlash over who gets to own a word and a dish that were never theirs to begin with. Hawaii today imports an estimated 85 to 90 per cent of the food its own residents eat, a fact this chapter treats not as trivia but as the entire stakes of every restoration project named above.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Serves 4 as a starter. 15 minutes.

Ingredients

500 g sashimi-grade ʻahi (yellowfin tuna), cut into 1.5 cm cubes
2 tbsp ʻinamona (or substitute: toasted macadamia nuts, pounded with salt)
2 tbsp dried or fresh limu (ogo), rinsed if fresh
1 tsp alaea salt, or to taste
2 tbsp for the modern layer, if you want it: 2 tbsp soy sauce, 1 tsp sesame oil, 1 spring onion, finely sliced

Method

Cut the ʻahi cleanly, keeping the pieces uniform.
Toss with ʻinamona, limu and alaea salt, tasting and adjusting salt as you go, the seasoning should be assertive but not overwhelm the fish.
Serve at once, at room temperature rather than fridge-cold, which mutes the fish's own flavour.
For the familiar soy-based version, fold through the soy sauce, sesame oil and spring onion alongside the salt-and-seaweed base, an addition rather than a replacement.

What a modern chef changes

The seasoning built as three distinct textural layers rather than one bowl tossed together, and the fish sourced with real precision.

Rung 1

Method

Toast and pound your own ʻinamona rather than buying a ready relish: dry-toast macadamia nuts (a genuine, sourced substitute where kukui is unavailable) until deeply coloured, then pound coarse with alaea salt in a mortar, for a relish with real textural bite against the smooth fish.
Treat the limu as a separate crunch element folded in last, not seasoning stirred through from the start, so its specific iodine snap survives rather than wilting into the fish's own moisture.
On sourcing, state this plainly: "sashimi grade" is not a regulated term in Britain, buy from a named specialist (see Sourcing in Britain) and order for the date you need it, rather than trusting a supermarket fish counter to sell you the right thing.

Open in the atlas: cook mode, scaling and tick off lists