Spicy Ahi Tuna Poke Bowl Recipe

Making Poke at home may seem intimidating but with my Easy Keto Spicy Ahi Tuna Poke Bowl Recipe, you’ll be shocked at how easy making your restaurant favorite dish at home can be!

In Hawaii, poke, a salad of marinated uncooked tuna, can be found in abundance, from fancy restaurants to food tucks to the deli section of grocery stores.

What is Poke?

Poke (pronounced poh-keh) is the Hawaiian word for “to slice or cut.” It is a delicious mix of traditional Hawaiian technique and food, with Japanese ingredients.

Poke is raw fish cut into bite-sized pieces and marinated and/or served with a sauce. The ingredients used as accessories to make the “bow” vary greatly and are what will determine if tuna poke is keto friendly.

While it may SEEM complicated, the truth is that Poke is very easy to make. All the work for this recipe happens when you’re shopping, because with Poke, the Tuna is the most important part!

What is the Best Tuna for Poke?

Poke can be made with a wide variety of seafood: crab, shrimp, mussels, squid, octopus, abalone, not to mention all the different species of fish. The most common, however, is ahi — or yellowfin tuna.

Becuase Poke is made with raw tuna, the quality of the tuna is of the utmost importance. It’s imperative that you are choosing high quality and safe raw tuna. Fresh would be best for most of us who don’t reside near a source, frozen is acceptable as well.

The best fish to purchase for poke is fresh, sashimi-grade tuna. However, if you only have access to frozen, that can work too.

The struggle is finding a trustworthy source. It can be tempting to reach for the first bag of frozen ahi tuna you find at the local grocery store but trust me it’s just too risky. You want to specifically speak to the fish monger at the store and confirm that what they are selling is indeed sushi/sashimi grade tuna.

I always keep Yellowfin Tuna from Vital Choice on hand in my freezer for tuna poke bowls. I like both their Ahi Tuna Saku as well as their Ahi Tuna Poke Kits.

Why Choose Vital Choice Tuna?

Vital Choice’s Sushi-safe tuna is flash frozen at or below -4°F (-20°C), which ensures that it’s perfectly safe to serve raw as poke, sushi, or ceviche!

Their sustainably harvested yellowfin tuna comes from small-scale, artisanal Indonesian fisheries. And they have partnered with a local supplier that delivers consistently top-quality tuna, pays fair-trade prices to fishermen, and helps them remove barriers to success! These small-scale fisheries are vital to remote rural communities, providing critical, nutritionally rich food source and employment.

Did you know that most Yellowfin sold in the U.S. is exposed to synthetic carbon monoxide (CO) gas to preserve the tuna’s natural reddish-pink color?!? This is not an innocent cosmetic color change! It also makes old fish appear fresher than it is, because tuna treated with CO stays red even after it spoils. Gross.

Instead of synthetic CO gas, Vital Choice tuna is exposed to filtered, flavorless smoke from certified-pure hardwoods. This preserves the tuna’s natural reddish-pink color, but it cannot mask old fish, because smoke-treated tuna will turn brown long before it begins to spoil!

For the best, most tender spicy tuna poke bowl, not matter where you get your tuna from, you want to make sure that the raw sushi grade tuna steaks have as minimal white streaks as possible. These streaks are connective tissue that are very chewy. I’ve always received the best tuna steaks from Vital Choice!

How to make Spicy Tuna Poke at Home?

Now that you’ve gotten your sushi-grade raw ahi tuna. Let’s talk about at the 2nd most important part of a spicy tuna poke bowl; the sauce.

For this Easy Spicy Ahi Tuna Poke Bowl Recipe, we’re using the dish served at our favorite local Hawaiian Restaurant as our inspiration. It’s beautiful in it’s simplicity and it was love at first bite.

You’ve probably already hooked on it, but incase you missed it My Keto Sweet & Spicy Asian Mayo Sauce Recipe is an addictively versatile sauce that I actually started making for this spicy tuna poke bowl long before we branched out to using it on my Easy Gluten-Free Crab Kani Salad Recipe.

I can’t say enough good things about this delicious keto spicy mayo, so I’ll let it speak for itself. Trust me it’s a fool-proof recipe that will transform plain-jane raw salmon into a Spicy Tuna Poke celebration of flavors!

Fill a bowl with your favorite keto poke bowl ingredients then top it with bite sized cubes of raw ahi tuna. You can drizzle the sauce on top of the whole bowl as I’ve done in these photos OR you can toss the raw ahi tuna cubes in the sauce for a more flavorful coverage.

You’ll find a full list of keto-friendly poke bowl ingredient selections in the recipe card below.

My favorite Keto Spicy Tuna Poke bowl includes a base of finely shredded cabbage with a pinch of fermented carrots, topped with shelled edamame with cucumbers and radishes.

And I admit that I must have TONS of my Keto Asian Sweet & Spicy Mayo Sauce! I’m drooling just thinking about it!

What is the difference between Poke and Ceviche?

As soon as we stared talking about raw fish, I’m sure many of you immediately conjured up thoughts of ceviche.

Hopefully you’re remembering my delicious Easy Seafood Ceviche with RO*TEL Tomatoes, Grilled Pineapple Shrimp Ceviche or my Southwest Shrimp Ceviche – I love a good ceviche, you too?

While both seafood dishes come from warm coastal areas, they’re from two different geographical regions, and as such, draw on very different ingredients to shape their flavor profiles.

Poke is Hawaii and has Asian flavors. Ceviche is Latin American inspired. Flavors aside the preparation is that truly sets them apart.

By marinating raw fish in citrus, the proteins in ceviche resemble more of a cooked consistency. Where as Poke is uniquely a raw textured fish dish.

I hope you enjoy this Easy Keto Spicy Ahi Yellowfin Tuna Poke Bowl recipe. IF you are craving more Asian-Inspired flavors try these recipes:

• Asian Pork Meatballs {Grain/Gluten-Free & Paleo}
• Marinated Asian Sesame Cucumber Salad
• Asian Chicken Salad with Sesame Ginger Dressing
• Keto Sriracha Lime Chicken Recipe
• Keto Grilled Firecracker Salmon Recipe

I hope you have a great day!