The third in our series of travel-inspired recipes, we’re recreating a tuna poke bowl from Nomad Lounge in Disney’s Animal Kingdom park. Nomad Lounge is the bar located outside of Tiffins Restaurant, one of our favorite restaurants in all of Walt Disney World Resort. Nomad Lounge features tapas-style snacks and amazing cocktails, wines and beers. It’s a hidden oasis from which to escape the heat of a summer day at Animal Kingdom park and sit for a while enjoying globally-inspired dishes. During my last visit, Kristen and I sampled a few snacks with the tuna poke bowl being the most delicious. While social distancing at home and unable to visit Nomad Lounge anytime soon, it’s the perfect time to attempt to make it with ingredients already in my kitchen.
Snacking at Nomad Lounge
The tuna poke bowl at Tiffins Lounge put the spotlight on the freshness of its few ingredients: tuna, mango, edamame, seaweed salad, cucumber and sesame seeds. Luckily, I had tuna steaks in my freezer already, an abudance of soy sauce, frozen edamame, frozen mango chunks and cucumbers. Unfortunately, I had to substitute fresh ginger with powdered ginger and sesame oil with regular vegetable oil. I didn’t have seaweed either and didn’t have a replacement - so that was completely out of my version.
Ingredients to recreate Nomad Lounge’s tuna poke bowl
Here it goes:
I combined nearly an entire bottle of soy sauce, two tablespoons of vegetable oil, a squeen of honey, freshly-squeezed lime and generous shakes of ginger into a bowl. After the tuna thawed, I diced and submerged in the marinade. Moving the tuna and marinade into a large ziploc bag, the mixture sat in the refridgerator for a few hours.
Marinating tuna in soy sauce, vegetable oil, honey, lime and ginger
In the meantime, I called an audible and decided to use the cucumber in a salad within the bowl. For additional texture, I added red onion and marinated with the cucumber in rice vinegar and oil, salt and ginger. This also gave me an excuse not to try to shave the cucumber as beautifully as the Tiffins version!
Editing original recipe with cucumber/red onion salad
Although my plating definitely isn’t as lovely as Nomad’s version, I placed the marinated tuna, thawed mango chunks, thawed edamame and cucumber/red onion salad in their own little pockets on the plate. Because I didn’t have sesame seeds, I garnished the plate with toasted panko crumbs - seasoned with salt, ginger and cardamom. Almost forgot, I added avocado slices because what goes better with tuna and mango!
Tuna poke bowl inspired by Nomad Lounge
The thought of making a poke bowl at home seemed intimidating, but it was actually quite easy. My family complimented the taste and flavor, and I loved how easy it was to clean after “cooking.”