How to Make Teriyaki Sauce

I’m going to show you how to make teriyaki sauce. A lot of people are scared of teriyaki sauce. They think there is something magical that you have to buy it in a bottle or something. But a lot of those things that you buy in the bottle, they have a lot of other ingredients that you might not be able to pronounce that might not be useful to your body and it’s so easy to make.

So, we’ll start by putting a little water in my pan here. It’s a half-cup water. And then of course, you need soy sauce, and this is organic tamari. Tamari means that it’s naturally brewed. It was allowed to ferment to get the flavor instead of adding chemicals to get some flavor from it. So organic tamari goes in there. And then every soy sauce has some sweetener. There are actually a couple of sweeteners sometimes. Usually, it’s brown sugar, and brown sugar is just white sugar that had their molasses added back into it.

And I’m going to use something called rapadura which is an unrefined sugar that never had the molasses taken out of it. Now, I have a couple of tablespoons of that. Put that in. And, a clove of garlic that was minced—actually, it was pressed in a garlic press. So water, tamari, brown sugar or rapadura, garlic. And then, good teriyaki sauce has some freshly grated ginger and some honey in it. And what I do is I mix up honey and ginger because grating ginger is a task. So, I grate a whole bunch of it up and mix with honey and heat it a little bit and then just keep it in a jar of this in the refrigerator. And, it’s really handy when you need fresh ginger and a sweetener in a recipe or sauce. You can use it—like to put on fish or something or a little ginger tea. It’s really fast that way.

I put two tablespoons of that in the teriyaki sauce. I’m turning the heat up. I’m just marrying the flavors. So of course, if you let it reduce a little bit, that is going to intensify the flavors, and what reduced means is reduction. What reduction means is that you just cook a little of the water off by letting the steam go out.

And I use this to make a teriyaki chicken, teriyaki shrimp, teriyaki salmon and you can use part of it to marinate the meat or the fish or tofu.