The rice. The salad. The tofu. All your best-laid plans… None of them mean anything if your teriyaki sauce is disappointing. We all know the feeling — You splurged and bought the nicer-looking bottle of the two you were debating between on the grocery aisle. You’ve spent your evening preparing a meal that should be full of nostalgic, comforting flavors and textures… And after all that, the sauce is just… Not there. Too thin, weirdly-seasoned, too salty, or just inexplicably “off.” Those bottles are fine as marinades, but they just aren’t quite the sauce you desire. Teriyaki sauce like the one from your favorite restaurant just isn’t available on store shelves. But do not fret. Cast aside the last of your doubts. You can make it yourself, and it’s easy!

There are many teriyaki sauce recipes out there. There are many variations of teriyaki, and every restaurant has its style. Every home cook has their own way of recreating those flavors in their kitchen. When developing this recipe, we had two major priorities in mind. 1) David wanted it to taste like his childhood memory of the sauce at the hole-in-the-wall teriyaki joint he grew up going to. Maybe it has a different vibe than your favorite teriyaki sauce, but this is how his quintessential teriyaki tastes. 2) We wanted to use ingredients we already keep in our pantry. While traditional teriyaki sauce uses mirin (a sweet, low-alcohol rice wine used as a condiment in Japanese cooking), we use seasoned rice vinegar in its place. This provides the subtly sweet-tangy, umami-enhancing acidity mirin lends to teriyaki sauce with an ingredient we already had in our pantry. (If you’ve got mirin around, then feel free to use it instead.) Seasoned rice vinegar is a real workhorse in our kitchen, so it will help you to have some around if you want to cook our recipes often! (It’s made appearances in our Weeknight Fried Rice & Teriyaki Restaurant Salad Dressing)

Another reason we wanted to develop this recipe for ourselves? Even though many local teriyaki restaurants have vegan options, many restaurant teriyaki sauces themselves contain honey! Maple syrup jumps in here to provide a deep, complex sweetness in place of honey.

Toasted sesame oil is certainly the most “special” ingredient in this recipe. It might be the thing you are least likely to already have around (but you’ll want it around to make salad dressing to go with your teriyaki). You can omit it if necessary, but we recommend spending a few bucks on a small bottle and adding it as a pantry staple. It’s high in polyunsaturated fats, so unless you’re cooking it into a sauce, it can become overheated at relatively low temperatures — it should be used primarily as a finishing oil. Drizzle some on roasted broccoli before serving, add it to stir-fried noodles during the last minute of cooking, or dress a salad with it! (Want to learn more about cooking oil types and when to use them? Check out our oil page. Drop us a line via our contact page or hello@powerplantpnw.com if you have more questions!)

Check out our tips and recipe below! You’re less than 15 minutes from homemade, restaurant-style teriyaki sauce.

Tips & Info

• Why make a separate cornstarch slurry instead of mixing it in with the first step? Cornstarch is an effective, accessible, neutrally-flavored sauce-thickener. Trouble is, it can seize up and/or get lumpy if added to a sauce incorrectly. Mixing the cornstarch and cold water into a slurry before adding it to the hot sauce reduces the likelihood of clumping and ensures even mixing.

• If you want to use this sauce as a marinade: Omit the cornstarch, cook only to a rolling simmer, then cool before marinading. That will make sure flavors still get developed without it getting too thick to soak into the food you are marinading.

• How do I store this if I make it ahead or have leftovers? Well, here’s the thing… Depending on the source, teriyaki sauce either requires refrigeration or stores well at room-temp. Here’s what we know: 1) Teriyaki restaurants keep their house-made teriyaki at room-temp, which seems to be accepted by local health departments. 2) All the ingredients used in this recipe, individually, are shelf-stable when stored at room-temp. 3) We end up refrigerating it anyway most of the time out of habit. Most things last longer in the fridge. But you’ll probably be fine if you store it in your pantry or cupboard. Either way, you should be using clean utensils and containers and keeping things that can introduce contaminants that lead to spoilage, like other food or dirty utensils, out of your leftovers.

• If it becomes too thick while stored, just add water 1 tbsp at a time while reheating.

We would love to see what you make!
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