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Hawaiian-kine Teriyaki Sauce
Because that subthread elsewhere in the comm has me thinking, as I so often do, on expat cooking cravings, and I see there are other teriyaki fans here, here's this homesick island girl's basic recipe and some optional variations.
Essential ingredients:
It's a very, very short list. Sugar, shoyu, fresh ginger, and sake and/or mirin. I use equal amounts of everything but the ginger, so if you have one cup of soy sauce you also want one cup of sugar, and one cup of either mirin or sake, or both poured in together to make up a cup's worth of the blend. And if you're starting with one-cup-of-each as your base unit, use a "finger" of ginger that's about two inches long; if you double/triple the batch just add in extra chunks of ginger to keep up the proportions. Don't worry about precise measurements, it's OK if you run a little bit short on one of the ingredients, and you can alter the ratio to suit your tastes - a lot of local cooks will go for more shoyu and less of the sugar, or equal amounts of shoyu/sugar and half or less rice wine, or not even use any alcohol at all.
Ingredient specifics:
Your shoyu should be a naturally-brewed Japanese style, either the most common koikuchi type or else a hearty tamari. (Most folks in the islands use either Kikkoman, Yamasa, or the sweeter locally-produced Aloha brand.) Don't use one of the other Japanese regional styles of shoyu, or soy sauce from other Asian countries; Chinese, Thai, Korean, etc. soy sauces are all super delicious too, but have their own unique flavors that aren't what this recipe is built around.
You can use white or brown sugar, depending on your preferences: I always use white because I'm often going to be using the sauce/marinade in ways where it will be developing caramelized notes naturally as the dish is cooked, but some local cooks prefer brown so you've got that caramelized taste right from the start, even in braised dishes.
I prefer to use mirin or a mirin/sake blend over just straight sake; it adds a rounder, sweeter taste to the sauce and is essential to giving foods that extra-shiny gloss when you're using the sauce as a glaze for grilling or broiling. But sake alone will do in a pinch, and here I will actually substitute Chinese or Korean rice wines if they're easier to get, since the alcohol flavors come through more subtly than the taste of the soy sauce. Some local cooks prefer to use sherry instead; I've used white (grape) wine when truly desperate, but it just doesn't quite taste right to me.
Ginger should be fresh root, grated, minced or microplaned into a juicy pulp; pregrated paste in a tube/jar is OK in a pinch but isn't quite as bright in flavor. Dried powdered ginger really just isn't the same; that's an emergency-only last resort for me here, and always disappointing if you're used to the taste of the fresh stuff. As noted above, I like to use a piece that's literally about the size of my thumb to start with for each cup of shoyu used, but feel free to tweak the amount more or less depending on how much you like ginger; if you're going with pre-pulped, say about a tablespoon of ginger puree for each cup. I've never tried using the bottled ginger juice sold for cooking, but that might also be a good substitute if you can find it more readily than good fresh ginger.
If you're not used to working with fresh ginger, don't waste your time trying to get the skin off with a vegetable peeler or sharp paring knife! Slicing the peel off all the lumps and bumps is slow and fiddly and leaves you losing a lot of the good stuff. Just scrape at it with the edge of a metal spoon) or butter knife instead; the skin will peel right off leaving all the useful parts of the root behind. And I'm a huge proponent of ceramic ginger graters, they make it super easy to get all the juice and the finely pureed bits of the root while leaving all the fibrous stuff you don't want behind. Look for them in Asian groceries if you have access to one, they often have ceramic graters much cheaper than the ones you'll find marked up in the fancy big-box kitchen/houseware stores. Here's a video of a cook using the spoon-peeling technique and a ceramic grater that shows just how quick and easy those techniques are: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cN0WrsNO1FQ
Cooking Instructions:
Dump everything into a saucepan, simmer gently over low heat while stirring until the sugar dissolves completely. (This can also be done in a glass/ceramic dish in the microwave, if you don't mind opening it up constantly to stir and check on how far the sugar has dissolved.) Either way, once you have a smoothly liquid sauce with no lingering graininess from the sugar, you can stop now if you want, it's done enough to use. Pour into a clean glass jar or bottle and store in the refrigerator.
Should you stop now? Depends on what you want the teriyaki sauce for. If your main intention is to have something you can use for marinade, this is definitely the point to quit. But if you want a thicker glaze that's better suited to broiling or grilling, or for use as a thick dipping sauce, you don't need to add any other ingredients: just keep simmering and stirring until the sauce reaches the desired consistency. You can turn the heat up a little to speed up the process and get more of a caramelized taste, just be careful not to let it overheat and scorch.
Can't decide? Make a bigger batch, pour off half for storage at the sugar-just-dissolved stage, keep reducing the rest down to a thicker sauce, and see if you like one consistency better and get more use out of it. Or if fridge space is at a premium, I'd suggest just cooking it all down a bit thicker, and you can thin out some of it with water whenever you want to use it as a marinade instead of a glaze. (I mostly cook mine on the thick side because it's a bit more time-consuming to make the thick sauce, so it's nice to have a big batch premade whenever I want it; the marinade-consistency thinner style takes so little time to put together that I'll usually just whip up a fresh batch instead whenever I need that specifically.)
Optional Extra Ingredients:
I don't generally use these when putting together my everyday base sauce - I like to keep it to the simplest three/four ingredient version and then doctor up that base whenever I want to do something a little different with it for a particular recipe. But lots of local cooks include some minced garlic, some toasted sesame oil or sesame seeds, and/or dried red pepper flakes or a dash of chili oil as part of their basic recipes. If you're going to be using it right away, you could also add in some sliced green onions or scallions, or some chopped fresh chili peppers.




Oh my god, I think I got the diabeetus just reading that. And I say that as someone trained in the "put a bit of sugar in everything" Shanghainese school of cooking.
Heee, yep. A lot of "localfied" Asian recipes run distinctly sweeter than the original Japanese/Chinese/Filipino etc. versions brought to the islands by immigrants in the plantation era; the story I've heard suggested to explain it is that before there was as much of a reliable imported supply of staples from the old countries and before there was any local commercial mass production of staples like soy sauce, sugar could be bought relatively cheaply since it was locally produced, but basics like soy sauce had to be imported at greater expense than people were used to. So recipes were adapted to work with what people had and could afford, and palates shifted as that became the new norm.
We've also got a definite tendency to supersize things. The most classic variety of beloved local favorite snack manapua is essentially just char siu bao under another name, but they're usually much bigger and doughier and have a wetter/saucier (and sweeter) filling than the average roast pork bun I can find at Chinese bakeries here on the mainland.