Right before the Covid lockdowns started a couple of years ago, we were starting to see “poke” shops popping up everywhere around here. If you’re not familiar with it, poke (pronounced poh-KAY) is a Hawaiian dish of raw fish served with soy or sesame oil and maybe green onions or seaweed. It’s a very simple, basic dish that makes the most of the main seafood/fish ingredient.
Of course as it spread east onto the mainland, we’ve “westernized” it by adding things like rice and a whole ton of other seasonings and vegetables and sauces and making it into a “bowl”. I’m pretty sure the poke bowl that we have been ordering via UberEats from the lunch place down the street would not be recognized by Hawaiians as such – but it still makes for a good healthy lunch or dinner.
UberEats can get expensive though, and so we recently decided to try to make these at home. I mixed and matched from different recipes I found online and we have made a few different versions until we finally landed on something that really hit for us. This is that version.
You can use brown or white rice in your bowl, based on your personal taste. I’m a big fan of Alton Brown’s baked brown rice recipe but for this particular instance we used white rice because it was what I had in the house.
Also there’s a lot of slicing and chopping of veggies in this dish and I cannot recommend enough that you get these two tools: The Benriner Vegetable Slicer/Mandolin and the Oxo Julienne Peeler. I use these all the time when making salads or when I need to slice veggies super thin or to a consistent thickness. (I have the older mandolin which is green. The newer one is white and a little wider which is nice for slicing larger things like eggplant or squashes.)
But the most important part of your poke is the protein. You want to make sure you get good quality, fresh fish and shellfish. I buy mine at either Whole Foods or at the Super H-Mart which is a Korean grocery chain that has an amazing seafood section. For this particular bowl I used ahi tuna but you can add whatever fish or seafood you like. I’ve added salmon, whitefish, scallops (both the big sea scallops or the smaller and sweeter bay scallops), octopus, squid, or any other seafood that you enjoy raw or lightly marinated.
The recipe below is for this particular meal, but don’t feel like you have to stick 100% to what’s in it. There are tons of variations to poke bowls and you can add or subtract a huge variety of vegetables, seasonings, and garnishes.
Tuna & Shrimp Sushi Bowl
Tuna & Rice Bowl
Ingredients
Ponzu Sauce
- ¼ cup light soy sauce
- 3 tbsp lemon juice
- 1 tbsp orange juice
- 1 tbsp Mirin
- 2 tbsp bonito flakes optional
- 1 sheet nori broken into pieces
Spicy Mayonnaise
- ¼ cup mayonnaise
- 2 tbsp sriracha sauce
- lime juice
Bowl Ingredients
- 2 cups white or brown rice cooked
- 1 lb ahi tuna sushi grade
- 1 tbsp sesame seeds
- 3 each green onions sliced thin
- 1 each avocado diced
- 1 medium cucumber sliced thin
- 4 each radishes sliced thin
- 1 medium carrot cut in thick shreds
- ½ c shelled edemame steamed
Instructions
- Mix up the ponzu and the spicy mayonnaise and set it aside for now
- Dice the fish; you can cut it in bigger chunks or mince it up quite a bit. I like mine more finely cut up but some people like bigger pieces
- Strain the bonito flakes and the nori out of the ponzu
- Toss the fish and the sesame seeds in the ponzu and let it marinade while you prep the rest of the veggies
- Begin building the bowls: Divide the rice into 4 bowls and start laying ingredients: fish, veggies, edamame
- Drizzle the spicy mayo over the top of the bowl