Actually very easy

Teriyaki sauce

The beliefTeriyaki is assumed to need a long list of Japanese ingredients and to be impossible without mirin and sake.

The truthSoy sauce, sugar and a little water. The rest happens by itself over heat.

15 minutes

How to make it

What you need

120 ml soy sauce
80 g brown sugar or honey
120 ml water
2 garlic cloves, grated
15 g fresh ginger, grated
1 tablespoon of vinegar

How the engine read this list (6 lines)

138 g	Soy sauce	soy-sauce
80 g	Brown sugar	sugar
120 g	Water	water
10 g	Garlic	garlic
15 g	Fresh ginger	ginger
15 g	Vinegar	vinegar

An empty weight means that line could not be turned into grams — either the amount is open ("to taste") or the ingredient has no record here. Neither enters the sum as zero; they do not enter it at all.

Combine the soy sauce, water, sugar, garlic and ginger in a pan.
Bring it to the boil, then lower the flame and cook uncovered for eight to ten minutes. About a third of the volume should go.
The test: lift a spoonful, blow on it to cool it and draw a finger across the back. If the line holds, it is ready.
Off the heat, stir in the vinegar and strain it. The vinegar cuts the sweetness and straining clears the sauce.

Why it works

The name comes from two words: *teri*, shine, and *yaki*, grilled — so the sauce is named for how it looks rather than how it tastes, and that shine is a sugar effect. As the sauce boils, water leaves, the sugar concentrates and the liquid thickens enough to coat a spoon; brushed onto meat, that sugar meets the amino acids in the soy in a Maillard reaction, giving both the dark colour and the characteristic taste. Soy sauce is itself a fermented product, and the free glutamate in it carries the umami — which is why teriyaki tastes deep on so few ingredients: most of the flavour was made over months of fermentation before the bottle was opened. Thickening with cornflour is a shortcut and it shows: a starched sauce is dull where a reduced one is glossy.

The rough sum

378 grams going in

413 kcal in total

100% of the mass has figures behind it. This is the sum of what GOES IN rather than of what comes out. Wherever something evaporates, drains or ferments the two differ: a kilo of milk is 150 g of cheese.

Diets it qualifies for

Vegan Vegetarian Lactose-free

Storage & shelf life

How long it keeps

Fridge, in a closed bottle: 2 months
With fresh ginger and garlic in it: 3 weeks
Freezer: 12 months
A bottle a brush that touched raw meat went into: Discard it

Soy sauce is about 15% salt, and that alone is serious protection — it is why this sauce keeps so long. Sugar lowers the water activity further. Even so, anyone adding fresh ginger and garlic should shorten the time: fresh plant tissue brings both water and microbes with it.

When to bin it Swelling, a yeasty smell or a film on the surface. Spoilage is rare in a salty sauce, and when it happens it usually came in with something fresh added later.

History

Where it comes from

Teriyaki is a Japanese technique — fish glazed with soy and mirin and grilled — going back to the seventeenth century. The sweet dark sauce the West knows was built in twentieth-century Hawaii, where Japanese immigrants brought local pineapple juice and brown sugar into it; what is bottled as "teriyaki sauce" is Hawaiian more than Japanese. In Japan the sauce does not come from a bottle: it is made in the pan at the time. This recipe is close to that version.

The knack

Do not add cornflour. If it needs thickening, boil it two minutes longer: the shine comes from water leaving, not from starch.
Brush it on in the last five minutes of grilling. Above 180 °C the sugar burns and the sauce turns bitter.
Soy sauce is salty, so do not salt the meat as well: anything marinated in this has taken up enough.

Pastes and sauces