Teriyaki Chicken

Variations

• Teriyaki don: Pile it over a bowl of rice with plenty of extra sauce.
• Teriyaki salmon: Swap the chicken for salmon, same method.
• Teriyaki tofu: Pan-fry drained tofu until golden, then glaze.
• Teriyaki meatballs: Roll ground-meat balls through the sauce.

Tips

• The rule for a sugary glaze was written for a grill, and a pan reverses it. Grilling is explicit: sugar, mirin and honey start burning around 150°C, the surface of food over direct fire is far hotter, so a sweet glaze belongs in the last two or three minutes, brushed on in two or three coats. That is how yakitori builds its tare and how dango is finished — and both of those pages name this dish as following the same rule. That is the grilled version of it. The recipe on this page reduces the sauce in the pan instead, and there the rule changes: while the sauce still holds water it cannot get past about 100°C, so for most of the reduction the sugar is nowhere near its burning point. That is a buffer a grill does not have. The moment the water is gone it vanishes, which is why the risk here is the last thirty seconds rather than the whole cook.
• So one builds the lacquer in layers and the other reduces it in a single pass. Yakitori's page puts it as "each thin coat dries and sets before the next goes on, and the lacquer is built rather than applied". Teriyaki reduces instead: water leaves, the sauce thickens, the film gets shorter, and the spooning in the line below is what keeps that shortening film moving over the whole surface. Stop while it still ribbons off the spoon — it sets much firmer off the heat.
• The gloss itself is two reactions, and the guide names this dish for it. What sugar does: "the glossy brown of teriyaki chicken or hong shao rou is both reactions running together" — caramelisation, which needs only sugar, and Maillard, which needs the sugar to meet the soy's amino acids. Mirin contributes to the second. Its sugars are largely glucose, and glucose is a readier Maillard partner than the sucrose in table sugar. Sake plus sugar is the honest substitute below, and that difference is what it gives up.
• Skin-side down over medium-low is the cold-pan rule from carbonara. Heat control carries the exception: where the ingredient is the fat supply, starting gently is the method, because dropped onto a hot surface "the outside firms first and locks the fat inside". Chicken skin is fat held in a sheet of collagen, so it has to render before it can crisp, and rendering is slow. Godeungeo-gui is the control on the other side: its fish skin goes onto a properly preheated pan, because there the fat has to sit between the food and the metal rather than come out of it.
• For crisp skin, dry the chicken well and start it skin-side down over medium-low heat.
• The sugar in the sauce burns easily, so reduce it last, over low heat.
• No mirin? Use sake + a little sugar; no sake? Water works.
• Rest the chicken before slicing so it keeps its juices.
• Keep spooning the sauce over for an even, shiny glaze.