Yakitori are grilled chicken skewers, and in Japan they are everyday food you eat standing at a small grill in a back street. They are easier to make at home than people think, but two misunderstandings ruin most attempts.
The sauce is not teriyaki, and half the menu has no sauce at all
Yakitori is seasoned in two ways. Tare is a glaze of soy sauce, mirin, sake and sugar. Shio is salt, and nothing else. At a Japanese yakitori bar, shio is an equal choice, not a fallback, and it is precisely the cuts of chicken with the most flavour that are most often served with salt alone. Skip shio and you miss half the dish.
And tare is not teriyaki, even though the ingredients overlap. The difference lies in when it is used: tare goes on towards the end of grilling or after the skewer is done, not as a marinade beforehand. The reason is the sugar. Put skewers with a sugary sauce over high heat from the start and the glaze burns black before the chicken is cooked through. This is the single mistake that most often separates home-made yakitori from what you get in Japan.
The name says something about this too. Yakitori means grilled bird. Skewers with pork or beef fall under the broader term kushiyaki.
What you need
- 600 g boneless chicken thighs, in two to three centimetre pieces
- 1 bunch spring onions, in three centimetre pieces
- Bamboo skewers, soaked in water for 30 minutes
- Flaky salt
- Togarashi to serve
For the tare: 100 ml soy sauce, 100 ml mirin, 50 ml sake and 2 tbsp sugar. If you want to skip cooking it yourself, we carry ready-made yakitori sauce.
Method
- Simmer the tare over low heat for ten to twelve minutes, until it is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. Let it cool.
- Thread chicken and spring onion alternately onto the skewers. Press the pieces tightly together, so they dry out less.
- Grill over high, direct heat with no sauce. Turn every minute. Allow four to six minutes in total.
- For the last two minutes, brush on tare, turn, and brush again. Repeat two or three times.
- Shio skewers are salted well before grilling and get no sauce. Scatter over togarashi when serving.
If you only have a frying pan, use a heavy pan over high heat without skewers, and brush in the same way at the end. A griddle pan gives a better result than a charcoal grill running too cool.
If you want to compare the sauces, we have a recipe for teriyaki sauce with four ingredients. For skewers with a completely different flavour direction, see satay with peanut sauce. More Japanese sauces are found under oils and sauces, and a fitting side in the recipe for fried noodles.
Frequently asked questions
What does yakitori mean?
Grilled bird. In practice the word is used for chicken skewers, while skewers of other meat are called kushiyaki.
What is yakitori sauce?
Tare: soy sauce, mirin, sake and sugar reduced into a glaze. At yakitori bars the same tare is used over and over, so it grows thicker and more concentrated over time.
How do you make chicken yakitori on skewers?
Use thighs, not breast, thread the pieces tightly together with spring onion in between, grill over high heat, and brush on the sauce only in the last couple of minutes.
What is the difference between yakitori and yakiniku?
Yakitori are skewers, almost always chicken, grilled over charcoal. Yakiniku is meat, often beef, cooked in pieces on a plate or grill at the table.
