Japanese · Main
Chicken Teriyaki
- Easy
- 25 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
Leads with a sweet edge rounding the corners, savory depth stacked from the pantry’s bass notes.
Ingredients
- 4 chicken thighs, boneless, skin-on
- 3 tbsp soy sauce
- 3 tbsp mirin
- 2 tbsp sake
- 1 tbsp sugar
The skills inside
Resting meat & slicing against the grain
The words inside
Sake Fundamentals: The Polishing LadderSake Service & PairingBaste, Arroser & Glaze
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · soy · alcohol
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Crisp the thighs skin-down over medium, pressing, 8 min; flip 3 min. Drain fat. 8 min
- Add the mixed sauce; simmer and turn to glaze, 2–3 min, until syrupy. 3 min
- Rest, slice, spoon over the glaze; serve with rice.
How it should come out
- The skin is one continuous lacquered sheet, mahogany and flat against the meat, with no shrunken lifted edges and no black patches where the sugar caught.
- The glaze is thin enough to see the skin through and thick enough to hang: a drip off the spoon stretches before it falls, and no thin brown puddle spreads from under the thigh. On the tongue it is savoury and salty first with the sweetness behind, not candy.
- The skin holds its own under the knife. It parts with the meat rather than sliding off as a soft sheet, and the glaze sits on it as a film instead of soaking into a spongy layer.
- Sliced across after resting, the meat is uniformly opaque and the board takes a trace of clear juice, not a flood.
- No fat slick anywhere: what sits under the chicken and around the slices is glaze, not oil, and it does not separate into a rim as the plate stands.
Where it goes wrong Soft skin under a sticky coat, because the sauce went into the pan before the fat had finished rendering and before the pan was drained. The glaze steams the crust it was meant to sit on, and the thigh arrives sweet, slippery and flabby with the skin loose from the meat.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Junmai or Ginjo sake
- Also Right
- Dry Riesling or Grüner Veltliner
- From the Taps
- Japanese rice lager
- Zero-Proof
- Cold green tea (sencha)
Umami bridges best with umami: sake’s amino depth shakes hands with dashi and soy where tannic wine would argue.
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