Sliced chicken thighs with crisp skin and a dark, glossy soy glaze fanned over white rice, scattered with thin green scallion rings

Chicken Teriyaki, the Soy Sauce Recipe to Learn First

Teriyaki is named for a finish. Teri is gloss or luster, yaki is grilling or broiling, and the dish is whatever comes off the heat wearing a lacquer of soy sauce, mirin, sake and sugar cooked down until it clings. Chicken thighs done this way in a skillet make the best first lesson in what soy sauce is for, because the bottle carries almost the whole dish. Four tablespoons of it are the only salt four thighs get, and they are plenty. The same four tablespoons give a sweet reduction its dark color and enough savory weight that it never tastes like dessert.

The method follows Kikkoman's own skillet recipe. The chicken browns skin side down, then steams through under a lid. The sauce reduces in the pan the chicken just left, and the meat goes back in to be turned through it. It is the older dish that the sweet bottled marinades in America took their name from, and the story of how it changed runs through Hawaii and Seattle.

Three teriyakis, and the one in this pan

In Japan the word has long been used for fish. Kikkoman's history of the sauce begins with yellowtail or salmon marinated in soy sauce, mirin and other seasonings, then grilled. The Online Etymology Dictionary dates the word in English to 1891 and says the dish was originally one of roasted fish. Japan's agriculture ministry publishes buri no teriyaki the plain way: yellowtail left overnight in soy sauce, sugar and mirin-style seasoning, grilled, and served beside a small mound of grated daikon. No garlic. No ginger.

Hawaii changed the recipe. Japanese immigrants there made the sauce sweeter, used sugar where mirin had been, and began adding ginger and green onion and sometimes garlic; some island versions took in pineapple too. Kikkoman says that in 1961, with the word already gaining recognition abroad, it began exporting a bottled Teriyaki Barbecue Marinade to North America.

Seattle grew the last branch. On March 2, 1976, Toshihiro Kasahara opened Toshi's Teriyaki in an old house at 372 Roy Street on Lower Queen Anne, with thirty seats. He brushed a sauce of soy, sugar and the chicken's own juices onto grilled chicken. By the late 1990s teriyaki shops in Seattle outnumbered the city's McDonald's.

This recipe belongs to the first family. Mirin and sake stay at the center, garlic stays out, and chicken thighs stand in for the fish because they forgive a minute's overcooking and stay juicy while the skin crisps. The Hawaiian version is a short step away: stir garlic and ginger into the sauce and give the meat half an hour or more in it.

What each bottle does in the pan

The soy sauce. Its taste is mostly salt and umami, with free amino acids, nucleotides and small peptides doing much of the work, which is why the ingredient list carries no salt. The deep red-brown comes largely from Maillard browning between those amino compounds and sugars. Put the soy sauce in a hot pan with the sugars from mirin and the browning carries on, so the glaze darkens as it thickens. The browning explainer has the chemistry for anyone who wants it.

Reach for koikuchi, the everyday Japanese style. It makes up roughly 80 percent of the soy sauce sold in Japan, and this ratio was built around it. The names of the other styles can mislead. Usukuchi, the "light" soy sauce of the Kansai region, is light in color and brewed with about 10 percent more salt than koikuchi. Cooks use it when they want a vegetable or a broth to keep its own color, and in this glaze it would push the salt up and the color down. White shoyu (shiro) is paler again, mild and sweet, and goes into soups and egg custards where a pale color matters. Double-brewed saishikomi is made with soy sauce in place of brine, so it comes out intensely colored and fragrant, and in Japan it goes mostly to the table as a dipping sauce. Yugeta's (shop Yugeta's), from a Sakado, Saitama brewery that dates its founding to 1923, belongs in a small dish beside the finished plate. The full range of styles, tamari included, is sorted in Soy Sauce: The Complete Guide, and the companion piece on buying soy sauce reads the label line by line.

The mirin. True mirin, hon-mirin, is made from steamed glutinous rice, rice koji and shochu or distilled alcohol, left for weeks while the koji breaks the rice down into a spread of sugars. It finishes at about 14 percent alcohol, and Japanese liquor tax law classes it as an alcoholic beverage. Much of the mirin in Japanese kitchens is mirin-fu, a mirin-style seasoning built on glucose and starch syrup with almost no alcohol, and it is what the agriculture ministry's yellowtail recipe calls for. Either works. Sweetness varies from bottle to bottle, so taste the mixed sauce before the tablespoon of sugar goes in and hold it back if the sauce is already sweet enough. Japan's mirin association insists the shine hon-mirin gives cannot be copied with sake and sugar, and it has an obvious interest in saying so.

The sake is there mostly as liquid. It gives the reduction more to boil off, which buys a little time before the sugars catch. Any dry cooking sake does the job.

Ingredients, for four

  • 4 boneless, skin-on chicken thighs, about 700 g (1.5 lb) total
  • 60 ml (4 tablespoons) koikuchi soy sauce
  • 60 ml (4 tablespoons) hon-mirin
  • 60 ml (4 tablespoons) sake
  • 1 tablespoon sugar, less or none with mirin-style seasoning
  • 1 teaspoon neutral oil
  • 2 scallions, sliced thin
  • Steamed short-grain rice, to serve
  • Optional: 1 teaspoon grated fresh ginger, stirred into the sauce

The proportion is easy to carry around: equal parts soy sauce, mirin and sake, and a spoon of sugar for every four of soy. It scales up or down without fuss and suits anything that can take a hard sear.

Method

  1. Mix the sauce. Stir the soy sauce, mirin, sake and sugar (and the ginger, if using) in a measuring cup until the sugar dissolves. Spoon 2 tablespoons over the chicken in a bowl and leave it for 10 minutes while you get the pan out. The rest of the sauce stays in the cup and never touches raw chicken.
  2. Dry and prick. Lift the thighs out, throw away the little marinade left in the bowl, and pat them dry with paper towels. Prick the skin all over with a fork so the fat underneath can render out and the skin lies flat instead of curling.
  3. Crisp the skin. Heat the oil in a wide skillet over medium heat and lay the thighs in skin side down. Listen for a steady sizzle; a roar means the pan is too hot. Cook 7 to 8 minutes without moving them, pressing down with a spatula now and then. The skin is ready when it is deep golden and comes away from the pan without tugging.
  4. Cook through. Turn the thighs, cover the pan, lower the heat and let them steam for 5 to 6 minutes, until the thickest part reads 165°F (74°C) on an instant-read thermometer. Move the chicken to a plate skin side up so the skin stays crisp.
  5. Build the glaze. Tip out or wipe away most of the fat but leave the browned bits stuck to the pan. Turn the heat to medium-high and pour in the reserved sauce. It foams and hisses, then settles into a boil of small, fast bubbles. Keep it going for 2 to 3 minutes, stirring. As the water cooks off, the bubbles grow bigger and slower and the pan starts to smell of toffee and toasted soy. Stop when the bubbles are fat and lazy and the sauce coats the back of a spoon thickly enough that a finger drawn through it leaves a clean line. It will tighten a little more off the heat.
  6. Glaze and serve. Return the chicken, skin side up, lower the heat, and spoon the glaze over it for about a minute until every piece shines. Slice across into finger-width strips, lay them over rice, scrape whatever glaze is left in the pan over the top and scatter with scallions.

Why it went wrong

Symptom Likely cause Fix
Bitter, burnt edge to the glaze Reduced too long or over too much heat, so the sugars went past brown Pull the pan as soon as the bubbles turn big and slow. A scorched glaze cannot be rescued; mix a fresh batch of sauce
Thin and watery, no shine Not reduced enough, or too much fat left in the pan Wipe the fat out before the sauce goes in, then boil another minute
Glaze hardens and turns stringy on the plate Reduced too far Loosen it with a spoonful of sake or water over low heat
Pale, flabby skin Crowded pan, wet chicken, or the thighs were turned too early Dry the thighs, use a pan wide enough to hold them flat, and wait until the skin lets go on its own
Too salty A saltier style of soy sauce than koikuchi, or salt added Use koikuchi and no added salt; thin the finished glaze with a little sake or water
Cloying A sweet mirin plus the full tablespoon of sugar Taste the mixed sauce first and cut the sugar

Cooking it in Denver

A mile up, water boils at about 202°F instead of 212°F; Colorado State University Extension's table gives 203°F at 5,000 feet. Two steps in this recipe feel the difference, and they pull in opposite directions. The covered step cooks the chicken in steam, and steam is cooler up here, so the thighs may want a minute or two longer. Let the thermometer decide, since 165°F is the target at any elevation. The glaze goes the other way. Liquids evaporate faster at altitude and the dry air hurries them along, so the sauce can reach the big-bubble stage before three minutes are up. Watch the bubbles and the spoon from the first minute. The guide to cooking at altitude covers the rest of the kitchen.

Other things that take the glaze

Salmon or yellowtail takes the dish back where it started. Cook the fillets skin side down for about 4 minutes, turn them for 2, set them aside and make the glaze exactly as above. Fish flakes apart more easily than chicken, so spoon the glaze over the fillets rather than turning them in it.

Tofu or eggplant both work if they are browned hard first. Press extra-firm tofu, cut it into slabs and dust it with cornstarch; halve small eggplants and score the cut side. The glaze needs a dry, browned surface to hold on to.

For a different shade of savory, swap one tablespoon of the soy sauce for mushroom garum (shop mushroom garum). The mushroom garum guide covers the bottle and where else it goes.

At the table, sesame seeds toasted in a dry pan give the gloss something to crunch against. Anyone who wants heat can spoon a garlicky chili crisp over their slices, and the chili crisp guide sorts out that category.

What holds the family together

Take away the garlic, the pineapple and the Seattle grill, and every teriyaki is soy sauce concentrated by heat until it sits on food as a shine. The word named that shine decades before Kikkoman bottled a marinade. Poured in cold, the bottle seasons like salt. Reduced with something sweet, it keeps browning until it becomes a coating, and the moment the quick little bubbles turn slow and fat looks the same in Denver as it does at sea level.

The Ambrosian Pantry is at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and ships nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com.

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