Picture: Sea Bream – The Teriyaki Way
Nowadays it is very normal to find teriyaki dishes as part of a Western menu or even a Mexican menu. However, teriyaki is originally a Japanese cooking technique in which food is broiled or grilled in a sauce made of soy, mirin and other ingredients. The word, teriyaki is made actually made up of two Japanese words – teri and yaki. Teri means luster and yaki means to grill or broil.
How to Cook Teriyaki?
In order to cook a teriyaki dish, you need to marinate or baste the main ingredients with teriyaki sauce and then grill, broil or roast them. The teriyaki sauce adds flavor to the dish and provides a shiny look to the dish.
Although you can buy bottled teriyaki sauce from your local grocery store, to get an authentic taste to your food, you should make the sauce at home. It is actually quite simple to prepare. All you need is soy sauce, sugar and mirin. Mirin is usually available at most Asian stores. It is a sweet rice wine, light golden in color, quite similar to sake. You can find two kinds of mirin – hon and shin. Hon mirin has a high alcoholic content. Shin mirin has an alcoholic content that is lower than 1% but is identical in flavor to hon mirin. This is why it is popularly used in cooking.
In the absence of mirin, use sake and sugar. You can also substitute the sugar with honey. However, without mirin you will not get that characteristic luster. Mirin also masks the smell of fish so it is effective in cooking salmon, tune etc. Although mirin is sweet, its sweetness is not as strong as that of sugar. The Japanese have been using mirin in their cooking for over 400 year now. It is made from a mixture of fermented ingredients like shochu, steamed mochigome rice and komekoji. Some people also add ginger to the sauce. Once prepared, you can use teriyaki sauce for both as a glaze and a marinade for meats and vegetables. As per traditional Japanese cooking, the meat is dunked in teriyaki sauce several times or brushed with the sauce repeatedly while it is cooking. You can cook a variety of foods in the teriyaki style such as salmon, shrimp, tuna, beef, zucchini, chicken and many more. You can even make a burger.
Traditional Teriyaki vs. Modern Variations
In non-Japanese cuisine, any dish that uses a teriyaki like sauce is called teriyaki. Some of these dishes also use garlic and sesame seeds which are foreign to Japanese cooking. A common way of making a teriyaki dish is to grill the meat or vegetables and then pour the teriyaki sauce on it. This is however not the traditional Japanese way of cooking teriyaki style. You may also come across chicken wings coated in teriyaki sauce. Teriyaki sauce is also used as a dip.
Credits for the image go to Wikipedia. See also a history of Japanese food.
