Sesame-free teriyaki sauce
Most recipes for teriyaki sauce I’ve found have no sesame in sight, yet why do most jarred teriyaki sauce include sesame? Sometimes sesame seeds are sprinkled on top of teriyaki chicken, but it doesn’t seem to be essential to the sauce.
I do love me a good jarred sauce shortcut, but when 1) the homemade version is pretty simple and 2) the homemade version is delicious, we go for it.
I include fresh ginger and garlic here, but to make it even easier, using the frozen Dorot cubes of minced ginger and garlic would work really nicely. But I just want to note that most of the teriyaki sauce recipes I found from my favorite Japanese cooks don’t include garlic or ginger at all. I refer you to Just One Cookbook’s recipe here if you’d like to get something more authentic.
You can use your sauce to coat your chicken after it’s cooked, on top of steak, fried tofu, fish.
Mirin. This might be the one item that you don’t have in your pantry or might be a bit harder to find. It is a subtle sweet rice wine, and it’s on Amazon. It’s shelf-stable so it won’t take up any precious refrigerator real estate. And if you plan to do some more Japanese cooking, it’s a great pantry item to have to go into your soups and other recipes. If you decide not to buy it, a dry white wine would suffice (the alcohol will evaporate in a minute or two).
Sesame-free teriyaki sauce
Makes about 1 cup
Ingredients
1/2 cup tamari (for wheat-free) or soy sauce
1/2 cup sugar
2 TBS mirin
1 tsp minced fresh ginger
1 tsp minced fresh garlic
1 tsp cornstarch
Directions
Put ingredients in a medium bowl. Stir to combine.
Heat a nonstick pan (after cooking your other protein) with medium heat. Stir sauce to recombine. Pour sauce onto pan and cook until it is thick and glossy, 5 minutes.
Place protein back into the pan to coat with sauce. Serve protein with rice. Drizzle sauce on the protein.
Contains:
wheat (if you use regular soy sauce; for wheat-free, use tamari)
soy (for soy-free, use coconut aminos)
