Getting Sauced and Into Fights: Taking on Teriyaki (and Karaoke)

We once nearly got into a fight in a futon store.

Seriously.

It began innocently enough, though with a poor phrasing on our part.

“Do you have real futon?” we asked.

“All our futon are real, sir,” was the reply and we regretted instantly making that mistake.

“Yes. I mean, do you have Japanese futon?”

“Futons are Japanese, sir. This is a futon store.” There was a noticeable edge being sharpened in his voice.

“Yes. Do you have the kinds of futon that are used in Japan?”

“These are the futon used in Japan, sir!”

Yeah, it was getting ugly. We made our departure as briskly as possible. We’d never heard of any actual violence being visited upon futon store shoppers but that may be just because the actual statistics have been covered up.

We were reminded of that conversation recently when a Japanese acquaintance asked why teriyaki sauce in the United States wasn’t teriyaki sauce. It’s an understandable question. Just as is the one about why American style futon are very different from the Japanese originals. It wasn’t, however, one we wanted to tackle at that moment. So instead, we just said, “Wait ‘til you see what we’ve done with karaoke.”

Americanized teriyaki sauce is undeniably a thing. It can be a reasonably decent thing. Mostly, it tastes like someone’s mixed some soy sauce with Mrs. Butterworth pancake syrup. But it’s not only a difference in the components of the sauce. Teriyaki is different in traditional Japanese cooking.

The yaki part of teriyaki means “grilled.” Yakimono—“grilled stuff”—plays an important role in Japanese cuisine. Given the way Japanese kitchens were traditionally constructed, grilling was more efficient and common than pan sautéing. Grilling is also slower way of cooking by comparison, an important factor here.

In Japan, teriyaki cooking appears mostly in bars or snack shops, the atmospheric little joints where travel hosts like Anthony Bourdain and Andrew Zimmern insert themselves and their crews and extol as places where “the real people” hang out and generally ignore the fact that those local people are, at best, politely putting up with the ridiculous intrusions. Wouldn’t it be fun to have a Japanese TV host appear with a crew on some Saturday night at the Courtesy Diner down on Hampton or the Eat Rite on Chouteau?

“Nani? Su-rin-gu?”

“Yeah. Slinger.”

“Futsukayoi no tabemono, nah?”

“Yep, definitely hangover grub and can someone please tell me how to say in Japanese, ‘get the hell out of my face and let me eat in peace?’”

Anyway, in these places in Japan, skewers of chicken pieces or other tasty bits (bonjiri or tails, and nankotsu, the breast cartilage are classics) are racked over coals, roasting slowly and getting frequent bastings with teriyaki sauce. They’re served as nibbles to go along with sake or beer. While American-style teriyaki dishes are often slathered in a gloppy, thick dressing, teriyaki is best thought of not as a “sauce,” but rather as a glaze. Teru or teri is “to glisten.” A good teriyaki dish has a delectable shimmer.

You can buy bottles of the sauce, of varying quality; it’s remarkably easy to make, though. In a saucepan, combine 1 tablespoon of sugar with 7 tablespoons each of soy sauce, sake, and mirin.

Mirin is essentially sake—made of fermented rice—with less alcohol and more sugar. It’s used in lots of Japanese dishes; you can find it any nearly any Asian grocery and at many regular places like Schnucks and Dierbergs.

Heat the mixture until it begins to bubble—keep an eye on it: if it hits a full boil it foams up like a Bernie Sanders voter at a stockholder’s meeting. Let it cool, then store it in the refrigerator. It’ll keep for months.

Once grilling season starts, wait for chicken thighs to go on sale and when they do, get some and bone, then fillet them so the meat is reduced to nibble-sized chunks. You can leave the skin on or take it off. Run skewers through the thighs and place them on the lowest setting or on the coolest part of the grill, away from direct flames, so they cook slowly enough not to burn. When they’re close to being done, that’s when you brush on the teriyaki sauce.

The slower cooking allows much of the fat to run off. It also firms the surface of the chicken, which allows the sauce to coat it more efficiently. The sauce should go on close enough to the end of the grilling process so that it just barely caramelizes—that’s the part played by both the sugar and the mirin, and darkens a bit.

One of the most popular ways of making this dish in Japan involves alternating the pieces of chicken on the skewer with short slices of green onion.

Can’t wait for grilling season? You can pan-fry the same thighs, boned and filleted. Heat the pan, then add a little vegetable oil. Dust the thighs with a very light coating of cornstarch. Fry them until the brown, then dribble in just enough of the sauce to flavor the chicken. The sauce should get added in the last couple of moments of frying. Put it in the hot pan too early and it burns.

Too lazy for that? Go to Nobu’s, on Olive, and get the grilled teriyaki squid. It’s probably the closest to what teriyaki tastes like in Japan.

Now, you want to fool around with the basic teriyaki sauce recipe? You’ll be in company with millions of Japanese cooks who do the same thing. Everything from grated ginger to pineapple juice to garlic (which is an essential for the Hawaiian version) to—we actually read about this recently—Sriracha sauce.

And as for the American version of teriyaki sauce? Well, American style futon aren’t like the original, but we’ve slept on a few over the years and they’re just fine. If you prefer the sweet, cornstarch-thickened ooze that many Americans think of as teriyaki sauce, that’s fine as well. But you ought to try the real thing.

And note, by the way, this does not apply to karaoke. The American version, the original Japanese: doesn’t matter. They’re both excruciating.