yakitori

It amazes me that sushi and miso soup are the Japanese foods that made the successful trip across the Pacific some 40 years ago. Who exactly decided that raw fish and fermented soy bean soup would work in the US back then?? The Japanese have a cuisine that includes noodle soup, grilled fish, fried veggies, hot pot, steak, and my favorite -- chicken morsels bbq'd on skewers. Those would all seem like much more likely candidates to appeal to the American palette - especially back then.

Today I made my first attempt at yakitori, which essentially means chicken (tori) morsels, grilled over live coals (yaki) and basted with a sweet soy-based sauce. It's dead simple and of course delicious. I only made one type of yakitori today but usually when you have this in restaurants or as street food, you would likely order several different types. Typical varieties include dark meat, liver, gizzards, skin, small chicken wings, ground up chicken balls, green onions, peppers, mushrooms, and the list goes on. Today I made chicken with green onion, which is one of the more popular types. Though it's usually made with dark chicken meat, I had a chicken breast in the fridge, so I used that. The basting sauce recipe is very simple, and is included below. I scaled it down quite a bit since I only made four skewers this time. Just bring the ingredients to a boil and it's ready to use.

To make life simple, I used the broiler in the oven to cook the meat, flipping and basting every couple minutes. I would estimate it took no more than 10 minutes to cook the chicken all the way through.The result was good, though it certainly lacked that smokey grilled flavor and the little charred bits that you get when you use coals. Nevertheless, it's a great little appetizer that could easily be turned into a larger meal. Rumor has it that there are plans to make a little yakitori grill for our balcony... I'm sure you'll hear about it if that comes to be. As for the rest of the meal today... salmon nigiri and onigiri with kelp.

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Simple Yakitori Sauce

Ingredients
12 Tbls Soy Sauce (3/4 cup)
  6 Tbls Sake
  3 Tbls Mirin
  2 Tbls Sugar 

makes about 1.5 cups yakitori sauce

Directions
Bring all the ingredients to a boil to dissolve sugar and to burn off the alcohol. Baste the skewers with the sauce while cooking over coals, or if you have enough sauce, dip the skewers into the sauce ever couple of minutes during the cooking.