Watermelon Poke Recipe

Great recipe! I made double and stored it in the fridge to top my poke (I don’t use the sauce left over from the watermelon)

This turned out amazing! Fantastic balance of flavors and I assume will even be better tomorrow! For fish lovers I marinated the recipe as is with some black seaweed as well and it gave a wonderful additional umami.

I’ve just made this and stashed it in the fridge. It already tastes so good! I can’t wait to have it for dinner tonight. Thank you!

Hi there !
I want to do this recipe so badly but my grocery store doesn’t have watermelon 🙁 do you think mangoes could do the trick? Have a nice day and thanks for this beautiful recipe!

Oh, I forgot to add that I swapped out the honey for agave to make it vegan-friendly and added just a light sprinkling of powdered nori in the marinade, but otherwise followed your recipe. So delicious!

This was insane! I’ve been vegan for years and am allergic to most fish, so I was not trying to replicate fish in any way. I simply thought that this would be a fun way to make something fresh and unique while using up a subpar watermelon. I made it to accompany delicious homemade poke bowls.

My boyfriend – who absolutely detests seitan and other vegan meats, and who is convinced that nothing could ever replicate the taste of meat products – tasted this and told me that it tastes nearly exactly like sashimi grade fish.

While it was great the first day, leaving the cubes in the marinade overnight took the flavours and textures to another level. The grainy watermelon became smooth and the flavours really popped. Will absolutely be making this again!

I’ve made this twice now, to raves and distribution of the recipe to everyone. It completely steals the show from the rest of the meal! We aren’t even vegetarian, and we love tuna poke. But this is really special.

I did not have toasted sesame oil so used regular sesame oil. Also, I’m lazy, don’t have a food processor, and the hand blender didn’t really work. I simply dumped everything except watermelon and oil (drizzled the oil in last) into the regular blender, and that seemed to work fine.

Plenty of leftover sauce is delicious on rice. This is really a triumph!

Made this today as the highlight to my poke bowl dinner. I LOVED it! The watermelon stays crunchy and juicy; the sauce is perfect. My bowl included spicy tofu cubes, sliced cucumber, avocado slices, shredded greens, sprinkle of sesame seeds and green onion on top. Fun, to make and to eat.

The only thing I couldn’t picture: how did you “process until smooth” the lemon zest, ginger, honey, cayenne and salt? I don’t have any implement (including my hand blender) that can turn that small amount of non-liquid ingredients into a smooth mixture of any kind. I ended up adding the lemon juice, vinegar and soy sauce just to have sufficient volume and liquidity to process the sauce. Everything seemed to turn out as described, though. Plenty of sauce, which was very tasty on the brown rice in the bowl. Thanks for this unusual and beautiful recipe.

Heidi – this loves and sounds wonderful (and not just because watermelon is one of my favourite foods ever!). Definitely putting this on my list of things to make before watermelon season is over!

I find it intriguing how certain foods can taste fishy while being vegetarian. E.g. did you ever try the David Chang’s ginger scallion sauce? For some reason it really reminds me of the flavour of tuna!