This reminds me of working in a brewery/restaurant kitchen in the middle of a rich Midwestern suburb (read: white as white gets), we wanted to do teriyaki wings. Instead of letting us make our own sauce, our idiot manager brought in a premade sauce made by a Chinese company in “the Korean style”. So it was a Chinese-made Korean-style Japanese-American sauce. Fucking what? Especially silly considering real teriyaki sauce is just four very easily attainable ingredients in more-or-less equal parts.
Soy sauce, sugar, sake, and mirin.. Garlic, ginger, chili, etc are all excellent additions, but aren’t necessary traditional. But as is kind of the main theme of this comment section’s discussion, nothing’s really “traditional” until thousands of people have done it thousands of different ways and enough time passes to be able to put it into some kind of historical and often geographic context. That is to say, I’m just a white guy on the Internet who’s done a fairly shallow amount of research into this subject, so definitely don’t take my word as teriyaki gospel.
You flavor a neutral oil with the ginger and garlic (don’t burn), add the brown sugar, a bit of soysauce, caramelize, add water, mirin or cooking wine slowly until desired thickness. You can do cornstarch slurry to dilute the flavor while maintaining the thickness.
You can toast some sesame at the start for that flavor.
The caramelized sugar may solidify if the liquid is too cold, redissolve it by increasing heat and/or liquid.
This reminds me of working in a brewery/restaurant kitchen in the middle of a rich Midwestern suburb (read: white as white gets), we wanted to do teriyaki wings. Instead of letting us make our own sauce, our idiot manager brought in a premade sauce made by a Chinese company in “the Korean style”. So it was a Chinese-made Korean-style Japanese-American sauce. Fucking what? Especially silly considering real teriyaki sauce is just four very easily attainable ingredients in more-or-less equal parts.
I wish to know this four ingredient teriyaki recipe.
Soy sauce, sugar, sake, and mirin.. Garlic, ginger, chili, etc are all excellent additions, but aren’t necessary traditional. But as is kind of the main theme of this comment section’s discussion, nothing’s really “traditional” until thousands of people have done it thousands of different ways and enough time passes to be able to put it into some kind of historical and often geographic context. That is to say, I’m just a white guy on the Internet who’s done a fairly shallow amount of research into this subject, so definitely don’t take my word as teriyaki gospel.
Ginger, garlic, soysauce, brown sugar.
You flavor a neutral oil with the ginger and garlic (don’t burn), add the brown sugar, a bit of soysauce, caramelize, add water, mirin or cooking wine slowly until desired thickness. You can do cornstarch slurry to dilute the flavor while maintaining the thickness.
You can toast some sesame at the start for that flavor.
The caramelized sugar may solidify if the liquid is too cold, redissolve it by increasing heat and/or liquid.