In either case, it’s seafood that’s not so much chopped as cut, so the pieces remain recognizable.īack in the day, the main seafood used was skipjack tuna and octopus.
“Poke” is the Hawaiian word for “to slice” or “cut crosswise into pieces” - depending, I guess, which dialect you opt for. Poke is everywhere - an amazing journey for a somewhat quirky local dish to an (at least) SoCal standby. I keep expecting to hear that Mickey’s Ds has introduced a Big MacPoke Burger. On a recent shopping trip to a local Gelson’s here in LA, my wife picked up several types of poke, including the bedrock variety made from ahi tuna. I asked a few affable locals to tell me why they had been queued up for hours, and it took me a while to figure out it was for something called “poe-kee” - a name I’d never heard before. Or, to be more precise, I encountered a round-the-block line of locals waiting outside a Maui supermarket to buy poke for their Christmas dinner - a much-respected and very tasty tradition on the Islands. It was more years ago than I like to remember that I first encountered poke during a trip to Hawaii.
