Try Making Salmon Teriyaki at Home

Posted by Karman Foods on May 8th, 2021

If you're looking for some new healthier recipes to make at home, consider salmon teriyaki. It's a healthy fish entrée that's easy to add to your dinner menu at home. It's easy to buy ingredients for the sauce from your favorite online Asian market. When you make it at home, you can adjust the ingredients to your tastes or health needs – such as reducing the sodium content. Chinook or Atlantic salmon are chef favorites because they are moist when cooked, but you can use any salmon that you like. Remember that you need equal thickness in the salmon filets to cook them evenly.

Well-known Asian food chefs highly recommend that it's best to coat the salmon with potato starch. A heavy coating on the outside of the fish helps it soak the teriyaki sauce and its flavor. If you have a bias against potato starch, you can try arrowroot or tapioca starch as alternatives. Make sure you avoid corn starch, or the filets can turn out gummy. Of course, you next need your favorite Japanese soy sauce or tamari if you prefer a gluten-free option. Authentic recipes include sake but make sure it's good enough for drinking. Be wary about cooking sake if it's grain alcohol with artificial flavorings.

The internet is overrun with Japanese teriyaki sauce recipes, and it can be fun to review many of them. But you'll do best to keep an eye out for those calling for equal parts soy sauce, sugar, and sake. You probably don't want to add additional ingredients; this is one of the rare recipes where it's best to avoid personalizing it. You'll likely see recipes with fruit juice, vinegar, garlic, sesame oil, etc. But sticking with the main ingredients and skipping the options leads to the best sauce. You also don't need thickeners because the sugar will caramelize. One possible optional ingredient is ginger juice if you like.

As you're filleting the salmon into pieces of equal thickness, pat it dry with paper towels. Next, coat it with potato starch. Heat the frying pan (or wok) with the oil added. Fry the salmon filets on both sides until they are opaque a bit less than halfway up the side. When they're finished, wipe all the oil out of the pan. Then pour in your teriyaki sauce ingredients and heat them. Cook until the sugar is completely dissolved. Once the sauce is ready, you can add the salmon back to the pan and turn it over several times until it is thoroughly coated with the teriyaki sauce and looks delicious.