Ok, I'm going to let you in on a huge secret. Teriyaki sauce is just sweet soy sauce. Mind blowing, right? Not really. My problem with it is usually that it is way too sweet! So I make my own. That way I get just the flavor I like and I'm not pumping tons of sweet preservatives into the kids. Yes, I realize soy sauce is basically salt (and sometimes preservatives) bottled in liquid form, but if you're going to splurge or "cheat" a little, I say do it right!
Take one bottle of your preferred of soy sauce (for small batches) and pour it into a sauce pot. Don't waste your time shaking it into the pot...rip that annoying little plastic pour spout right out of the bottle! Turn the stove on to a medium simmer.
Next add 1-3 cloves of finely chopped garlic. Amount is dependent on how much you like garlic and how big your cloves are.
Then sweeten it. I add about 1/4 cup brown sugar and 1/3 cup of local honey. We like the flavor of honey better than sugar and it's better for you too!
Then I add fresh ginger. Again, fresh ginger is really good for you and it gives such a clean, fresh, brightness to the sauce.
Break off a small chunk of the fresh ginger and peel off the skin. So we don't dirty extra utensils, we then use the peeler to carefully shave thin slices of the ginger.
Toss the ginger into the pot and let it simmer with everything else. Periodically give everything a stir so that the sugar and honey don't settle to the bottle.
You want the soy to reduce down so that it can have the thickness of traditional teriyaki as well as letting the beautiful umami flavors of the soy to become more pronounced.
Don't forget to taste it FREQUENTLY. If you're not tasting as you go there really isn't any point to making it. That goes for all your cooking. Why leave it to chance. Taste it! Taste it! Taste it! If it's too salty add some more sweetener. If the garlic didn't come through as much as you wanted, add some more. If the ginger flavor is perfect but you've got more reducing to do, spoon out the remaining chunks. It's all so easy, as long as you taste it.
When it's done it will be just the flavor you're looking for and will have a beautiful thick consistency (the consistency will thicken more in the refrigerator too). We let ours reduce for about an hour to an hour and a half.
Then we funnel it back into the original bottle (rinsed) and put it back in the refrigerator. It will obviously not fill the whole bottle because it will have reduced. I also pull out the chunks of ginger because the girls don't like it if they get a chunk and there's no point in throwing off an entire meal just because of some cooked ginger chunks!
This week we used our homemade teriyaki sauce for crock pot chicken. Chicken Teriyaki is one of my girls' favorite meals ever. Making it at home is easier and cheaper than heading to the Chinese food place, and way more fun! The girls help with weekly meal prep so they get to help with this too.
The chicken is moist, easy to cut with a fork and so delicious! Even better, crock pot meals are super easy as we all know, so it's a complete win! We serve it over brown rice and almost always have a quiet dinning table when this meal is served.
All moms know, quiet tables mean the food is good AND being consumed. And that's the whole battle right there!
Simple City Sam
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