The first thing you need to know is that “poke” is pronounced “pow – kay”. Okay? It’s from the Hawaiian word for “slice”. So that makes this a bowl of sliced food.
Traditionally it would be served with roughly cut chucks of octopus but try finding that in your local Asda. Having said that after eating roasted octopus in Italy Hannah told me “You should not eat things smarter than yourself”! She may well be right. You see, I was in a zero KM restaurant where everything is super local and sourced from within 1km. But we were 3km from the sea? Man, that octopus must have climbed the cliff, jogged along the track, scurried through the village, past the church, dodged the traffic and then thrown himself in the oven.
The ingredients are all fairly regular items you might already have in your larder; however, it’s the addition of the oranges that really elevates this into a full-on foodie flavour trip. So, use good quality oranges. It zings, it pops, it’s bloody amazing. It is also dead healthy and pretty cheap too.
Ingredients.
The dressing:
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- Juice of 2x oranges
- 2 table spoons of soy sauce
- A pinch of chilli flakes
- 3x teaspoons of grated ginger
- 1x teaspoon of sesame oil
- 2x finely chopped garlic cloves
The Poke:
- Salmon steaks. 1 per person.
- 1x cauliflower grated.
- Spring onions.
- Radish (a vegetable that is not full on rad, just rad’ish).
- Sliced avocado.
- Cucumber.
- 1x orange, in segments.
- Roasted pumpkin seeds and almond flakes.
- Fresh coriander.
Method:
- To make the dressing squeeze 2x oranges into a bowl and add everything else on the dressing list. Taste… add more chilli. No not that much. Oh, you’ve done it now. Let that sit around while you get on with the bowl.
- Cut the salmon into long chunky strips and rub in some olive oil. Season with sea salt and black pepper. Cook in an air fryer or oven, skin side up, until crispy.
- Roast off the pumpkin seeds and almond flakes while the oven is on. They are done when they start to pop and get a little colour. Set aside for garnish duties.
- Use a cheese grater to grate the cauliflower into the bowls. Hipsters call this “cauliflower rice”, but it’s really just grated cauliflower. Bloody hipsters and their trendy word bothering nonsense.
- Poke the spring onions, avocado, radish and cucumber. You haven’t forgotten what poke means in Hawaiian have you? Arrange that lot on top of the cauliflower.
- Carefully remove the skin from an orange. I find getting my fingers under the skin and working it off gets good results. Break up into segments.
- Pop your salmon on top of the poke ingredients, arrange the oranges around the salmon.
- Garnish with the pumpkin seeds, almonds and fresh coriander. Slosh a little dressing over the top, saving some for top up sloshes.
- Now you are doing the Okay Poke. Put your left chopstick in, left chopstick out… in… out… (sorry).
Pretty Bloody Amazing Eh?
You have to try this and let us all know how you got on in the comments below. You can do it. It is totally within everyone’s cookery comfort zone. Have you got a great variation of this? Then please tell us.
A serious bit
This recipe was all cooked up and written up before the terrible fires in Maui, Hawaii. At the time of writing, nearly 400 people are still missing and over 100 have died. Having mentioned Hawaii and mangled its food, it seems appropriate to highlight the American Red Cross disaster relief collection for Maui. IOur thoughts go out to those who have lost loved ones and homes in the fires.
