We’ll be covering the various sauces we use in our Japanese and Korean cooking classes. In this video we cover Unagi, or eel, sauce, which is often used to garnish sushi rolls, such as Tempura Shrimp Sushi Rolls.
Unagi sauce compliments eel dishes, but also tastes great with other rolls and foods. It’s basically sugar and soy sauce that’s been caramelized and reduced. It’s not made from eels. We’ve had students in our classes think that before, thus the clarification.
This method used corn starch which, from a ‘foodie’ perspective, isn’t ideal as it can affect the flavor. But, it’s quicker for making larger batches. We’ll cover the method without starch in another post/video.
Ingredients
- 1Tbsp. corn starch
- 1Tbsp. cold water
- 1 cup granulated white sugar
- 1 cup soy sauce (use a strong or dark one, like Kikoman)
- 1 Tbsp Mirin sauce
- ½ cup sake (optional)
Directions
- Combine the starch and water in a cup and mix well.
- Add sugar, soy sauce, mirin and sake to a small pot.
- Heat pot to medium and stir for a few minutes
- As the mixture heats, add the starch/water solution and continue stiring
- Continue heating and stirring. It’ll take about 15 minutes.
— As the boiling/bubbles start to increase, lower the heat to prevent boil-over
— The bubbles will get foamier towards the end of the 15 minutes. Once it looks thick, remove from the heat and let cool. - It’ll still be a bit runny when hot. Don’t worry. Let it cool and it will thicken. Chilling it thickens it more.
Bottling the sauce makes it easy to spread over sushi rolls. A nice zig-zag motion is optimal for plating.
Video Recipe for Unagi (eel) Sauce
Click on the video below to follow along or scroll past to view the ingredient list and directions.