Thursday, September 1, 2011

Sesame Ahi Tuna





When I come across a photo or a description of a dish I think I would like to have, I often think also of how I would change it or improve it. I came across a photo of a tuna dish from a restaurant in Hawaii, I believe. There was little information, but the image was striking and caught my eye. It was a dish of seared ahi tuna with wakami salad and daikon. It has a ponzu sauce of some kind, and what looks like a fruit relish or salad in the background.


Tuna, especially raw tuna, is always a hit in our household, so went to the market and got a few ingredients to try and copy this dish, with a few original touches of my own. I cooked some sushi rice with a little salt, sugar and rice vinegar, made a glaze of honey, red pepper paste and ponzu sauce which I brushed over a slab of sushi-grade ahi tuna, then packed two sides with roasted sesame seeds. I heated a skillet with a little sesame oil and seared two sides for twenty seconds each. I made a sugar plum/mango salsa and spooned it into a half an avocado, shredded some daikon root and pickled it in a coriander/star anise brine and mixed it with some seaweed salad. Lastly I sauteed some enoki mushrooms and some pea sprouts and made a sauce of reising vinegar and ponzu sauce, which I let reduce to a near syrup.


I spooned the rice into the center of the plate, thinly sliced the tuna and wrapped it around the rice, topped with the seaweed/daikon salad, added the fruit salsa and the mushroom mix and drizzled it all with sauce.


My in-house critic and consumer of all things tuna devoured the dish and proclaimed it delicious, and except for the sauce being a little saltier than I wanted, I was very happy too. I could have arranged the tuna in a different manner, closer to the original image. Overall I thought it came out very well.


This is the image I based my own version on: