This recipe came to me from my good friends at epicurious and is astonishingly simple for an epicurious recipe. Like all their stuff it is delicious. The only trick to it is you might have to hunt to find a couple of the ingredients. We have no problem polishing this off and as a bonus the Ravenous Hound gets his own chicken teriyaki.
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5 skin-on boneless chicken thighs
1 tsp. Kosher salt
1/3 cup soy sauce
1/3 cup mirin, which is a Japanese rice wine
1/3 cup sake
Put the chicken on a cutting board and poke holes in the skin. Rub the salt all over.
In a large skillet arrange the thighs skin-side down and cook over medium heat for about 5 minutes. Don’t add anything to the skillet, the chicken will throw off some juices, and just let them hang out, no moving around. Reduce the heat to medium low and cook for 12 more minutes. Lift up the chicken a couple of times so the fatty juices run underneath. The skin will turn crispy and golden brown.
While they’re sizzling away whisk the soy sauce, mirin, and sake together in a small bowl.
Take out the chicken and put it on a plate skin-side up. Wipe out the skillet, bring it back up to medium heat, and slosh in the soy sauce mixture. Stir it around every so often for 4 minutes. Add the thighs back in skin-side up and let them cook for a minute, then turn them over (so they’re skin-side down) and cook for another minute. Take out the five thighs and slice them into strips. Put one thigh’s worth over the Ravenous Hound’s kibble; put all the rest of it on two plates on which you’ve dumped some cooked white rice. Pour the remaining teriyaki juice from the skillet over the thighs and rice and you’re done. The epicurious recipe I have says you also make a radish salad that you top with the chicken but let’s not.
A note about Benihana: I haven’t been to a Benihana in years and decided to confirm that they still exist. They do, there’s one in Times Square and an outpost at Yankee Stadium (!), and they offer about 1,000 items on their dinner menu, including chicken teriyaki.
I had zero clue that teriyaki sauce was so simple to make. I can work with this!
This is a very basic teriyaki sauce. The whole recipe is very basic, which is rare for epicurious. There are places in America and some neighborhoods in New York where all kinds of Japanese and other Asian ingredients can be found; mine is not one of them. That’s the beauty of this recipe for the ingredient-bereft.
Western WA. has 100s of Teriyaki fast food restaurants and most have very similar sauces to this though ironically, most are owned by Koreans not Japanese. I make a Korean version of teriyaki sauce that I marinate the chicken in that is:
Soy sauce (low salt)MirinOyster sauceBrown sugarSesame oilGarlicGingerGreen OnionsRed pepper flakes
I make it less sweet than teriyaki but it is delicious.
Well that didn’t format very well! Sorry!