Teriyaki

Teriyaki is the name of a Japanese sauce, as well as food that had been marinated in that sauce and then grilled, broiled, or (occasionally) fried. Apparently the word teriyaki is a combination "teri", meaning lustre or glaze and "yaki" meaning grill or broil. You can buy teriyaki sauce in a bottle, in which case it will be adulterated with the usual food additives, or you can make your own, in which case you'll know exactly what's in it.

Here's what you'll need for basic, traditional teriyaki sauce:

• 1/2 cup (120 ml) good quality soy sauce or tamari sauce
• 1/2 cup (120 ml) mirin (or sherry, or a 3 to 1 mix of sake and sugar)
• 2 tblsp (30 ml) each minced fresh garlic and ginger (use a rasp to easily pulverize them)
• 2 tblsp (30 ml) sugar or honey

From here it's simple. Just heat all the ingredients in a small pot and simmer for 5 minutes. Cool and use immediately, or strain into a bottle and refrigerate for up to a month. (The straining helps the sauce to last longer, but you'll need a fine mesh strainer.)

By the way, it's the sweetness of the sugar and mirin which are responsible for giving lustre or glaze to the cooked food.

For Japanese cooking, chicken, fish, or shellfish are usually either marinated in, or brushed with, teriyaki sauce before grilling. But you can substitute beef or pork, tofu, shitake mushrooms, or some other vegetable for those traditional meats, or use the tasty sauce as a flavour enhancer in any number of dishes. Let your imagination roam! It's delicious stuff.

I got the translation of teriyaki from
http://japanesefood.about.com/library/weekly/aa080500a.htm

chinakow says: FYI I made this using the sake and sugar and all I can say is "GOOD GOD is this good!!"

I tried and I tried and I tried. Six times, at least, I tried tweaking recipes I had found on the Internet. Teriyaki sauce is damn near impossible to bullshit, let's put it that way. You really need to get the right mixture of ingredients. Suffice it to say, I didn't have it.

The first round, prior to now, was utterly doomed. In every case, the teriyaki chicken I had from restaurants was perfect: Sweet and a little tangy. I could not impart the same traits upon anything using the recipes I found and tried. They were something like 3 parts soy sauce, 1 part mirin, 3 parts sake, and 1 part sugar. My very first attempt yielded FIRE! I set my friend's stove on fire after it boiled over while I was heating it. No matter what, though, this always came out too salty. So I would do things like attempt using brown sugar instead of white sugar. Admittedly, it helped a little, but it was still the bane of my skills. I increased the mirin, but it didn't seem to have an effect. I could've lowered the soy sauce, but there simply wasn't much there in my batches in the first place. I stopped making it, even though everyone seemed to love it.

Six months after I last make a batch of the failure, my AP Calculus class is barbequeing. I'd ended up being late to class, but as I walked in, I smelled the heavenly brew. Salvation! But who had made it? I asked around and found out who made it. I couldn't find him and when I did he was avoidant. 'AH-HAH! I know where he works! There I shall extract the recipe.' I thought to myself. And so I proceeded to his work, a grocery store. He is a bagger there, so when I ran into him a couple weeks later with a lull in the shoppers, I pulled him aside. Sure enough, he gave it up easy as pie.

"The recipe, the recipe!" The beauty. Simple, but tasty. Add it freely to what you wish. I tried it on fresh hamburger, marinated it for a day and cooked it. I subject my friend's family to experimentation with the recipe. Not a single negative comment to be had and I am darn happy with it. Granted it is probably less than "Japanese" it is awesome. Here it is:

1 cup brown sugar
1 cup soy sauce
2 tablespoons lemon juice
2 cloves garlic, smashed or minced
Mix in a bowl. It doesn't particularly need to be heated, but that would aid in the dissolution of the brown sugar. Last time I made a batch, the brown sugar wouldn't completely blend in, but heating it up probably would've solved the problem. I'm lazy. Marinate, glaze, brush it on stuff, do as you please! Just try it, once in your life, try the stuff. Unless you're allergic to something in it.