Easy Yakitori With Tare Sauce

Chicken thigh fillets are skewered with scallions, browned lightly on the grill then brushed repeatedly with tare (a reduction of soy sauce, sake, mirin, sugar and ginger) until cooked.

I didn’t think I’d be updating my yakitori recipe in less than a year. But after we made yakiton, we realized just how much flavor and texture scallions add to grilled meat, so we had yakitori again and inserted the greens between the cubes of chicken fillet. Other than that, the recipe remains the same.

Yakitori is what would be called “cocktail food” outside Asia

That’s yakitori. And it’s great with sake. Or beer. That’s the most popular way it’s consumed in Japan. Like cocktail food. It isn’t paired with rice nor bread but with alcoholic drinks. It’s a culture thing. Restaurants that serve yakitori are known as izakaya which, conceptually, are similar to Spanish tapas bars.

If you’re cooking yakitori at home, however, and the people who are going to eat the grilled salty-sweet morsels are members of your family that may or may not include children, there is no reason why yakitori has to be served with alcoholic drinks. Serve it with rice and it’s just as lovely. Or serve yakitori by itself.

What is tare sauce?

It’s a syrupy sweet-salty sauce. It can be bought in bottles but if your pantry is stocked with Japanese staples, it is simple enough to make it at home. You measure the ingredients, dump them in a pan and you let the mixture boil gently until reduced by half. The instructions for making tare sauce is provided in the yakitori recipe below.

But if you think that basting skewered chicken with tare sauce is the only way to cook yakitori, know that there is such a thing as shio yakitori too where the chicken is sprinkled with salt, and nothing more, during grilling.

Is yakitori always cooked using chicken fillet?

Fillets are not the only cuts of the chicken for yakitori. Offal like liver, gizzard and tail, and bone-in cuts like wings, can be skewered and grilled, and the grilled result is yakitori too.

At home, we like to use chicken thigh fillets, skin on, and we baste them with tare.

So, yakitori is just grill and baste?

Well, yes, although there are a few tricks to make sure that you get the best texture and flavor.

First, it is important to lightly brown the chicken on the grill first before you start brushing the meat with tare. If you skip this step, the chicken will have the mouth feel of boiled meat. That’s bad yakitori.

Second, you can’t take a short cut by just mixing the tare ingredients and brushing the mixture directly on the meat. For two reasons.

One. you want to boil off the alcohol taste of sake leaving only the rich undertones of the wine. If you don’t, the sauce will leave a nasty flavor in the mouth.

Two. Without reducing the tare, the mixture will be too thin. Watery, in fact. Brush watery liquid on the chicken fillets and it will just flow down instead of sticking to the chicken. You can’t expect the flavors of the sauce to be absorbed effectively that way.

So, there. While cooking yakitori may sound simple, it is actually deceptively simple. But is it a doable home cooking project? Sure, it is!