25-04-2025
It's Teriyaki Time
Good morning. John T. Edge brought us this recipe for a Seattle-style chicken teriyaki, adapted from one by Sujan Shrestha, many years ago: salty-sweet and garlic-gingery, with a starch-thickened, glossy sauce that pairs beautifully with rice and broccoli. I make the dish with less sugar and more pineapple juice than John calls for and only marinate the chicken for a few hours before cooking. Cook's choice.
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Sometimes I make it with steak tips and a lot more soy sauce, and serve the result with fries. That's a regional teriyaki, too: a dish that nods at one served for years at the Rhumb Line bar in Greenport, N.Y., best consumed with cold beer and an Elmore Leonard novel. For that I like a lot of marination, at least 24 hours.
You can make salmon teriyaki (no need to marinate!). Cabbage steak teriyaki (same). And if you make Genevieve Ko's recipe for teriyaki sauce, you can bring a shine to firm tofu, to pork chops, to seitan, to asparagus or whatever you like or happen to have on hand.
The idea, this weekend, is just to mess around with teriyaki and to celebrate how sweet and salt can multiply the power of ginger and garlic to the benefit of whatever you're cooking. (Teriyaki shrimp would be incredible. I'd cook the shrimp in butter until they're just going pink, then toss with the sauce and slide everything onto a warmed platter to serve with rice and steamed spinach.)
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