Teriyaki Marinate

This is a simple marinate I make when I feel like eating teriyaki. It's best to marinate the meat 24 hours for full flavour. This marinate is watery, if you want a thicker marinate you can substitute the sugar with honey or molasses.
When I want to cook with a thick teriyaki glaze I add corn starch to the recipe to thicken it up and make it sticky.
I'm also lazy so I tend to throw everything into my hand blender and blend it all together :)

Teriyaki Marinate

Ingredients

• 30g (2 Tbsp soy) sauce
• 118.5g (1/2 cup) water
• 25g (2.5 tbsp) brown sugar
• 3g ginger
• 5g garlic

Directions

1. Put all the ingredients together and blend

And really that's it. You can wait for the bubbles to un-foam before you use it if you want, I haven't noticed difference between when I wait and not wait. 

Tip: If you are using food saver bags, Freeze your marinate into a thin layer. When your meat is dried, put it into your food saver bag. Spread the frozen marinate around on the meat and vacuum seal with the food saver. Leave it in the fridge for the marinate to unfreeze and coat your meat nicely.

Let it marinate for several hours before you use it or put it into the freezer.

I found this is the easiest way to marinate using a small container with little marinate.

If you try to marinate in a box, you'll either have to flip and mix a lot or you'll just use more marinate so you can cover all the meat. 

叉燒醬 Chinese BBQ Pork Sauce (Char Siu)

It's true you can buy the Lee Kum Kee Char Siu sauce from the supermarket but honestly, I usually have all the ingredients I need to make it, so I just make it whenever I need.
I typically make it, then use it to marinate something and freeze it.

The color of your Char Siu will not be as bright as what you buy from stores. The only way to make it that bright color is to use food coloring which I refuse to do. But when you eat it, you can totally tell it's char siu. :)

Char Siu sauce can be use to make Char Siu or you can just use it to cook other items like spare ribs.

叉燒醬 Chinese BBQ Pork Sauce

Prep time ~5mins

Ingredients 

• 30g (2 tablespoons) soy sauce
• 25g (1 tbsp) oyster sauce,
• 20g (1 tbsp) hoisin sauce,
• 15g (1 tbsp) wine
• 30g (3 tbsp) brown sugar
• 5g (1 tsp) garlic
• 85g (1/4 cup) honey,
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/4 tsp  5 spice powder

Directions

1. Measure all the ingredients and mix it together
2. Store in jar or use right away

This amount will  fit into a small mason jar.
It will also marinate 3lbs of pork butt to make into char siu.

Korean BBQ Sauce

I love KBBQ ribs but it's very expensive to order when you're at the restaurant. So I asked my Korean friend how he makes his KBBQ ribs.
And his response was, it's simple, just throw in everything, blend and marinate it overnight and then cook it.
He was able to give me a list of all the ingredients but he was not able to give me the amounts since he never measures it.
I tried the same and I found that generally, the taste is very similar as long as I don't go overboard on any one of the ingredients (ie half a finger of ginger, too much soy sauce etc).
So I took the time to measure and test the recipe and tested it on my husband until he thought it matches fairly well.

Another note I wanted to make up front is what I used for the sweetener.
He uses only honey, it has a unique flavour and it thickens the sauce!
Honey will make the sauce nice and thick and clingy which makes it easier to use to marinate. But at the same time, honey can be very expensive depending on you live. So my recipe below uses a bit of brown sugar to replace some of the honey but you can always swap it out for pure honey.

So this post will cover the marinate itself. You can make a big batch and keep it in the fridge or freeze it for future use or just make it as you need.

Korean BBQ Sauce

Prep Time: <5 mins Makes enough to cover about 500g of ribs pending on the box/bag you're using for marinating

Ingredients

• 40g Soy Sauce
• 5g Ginger
• 10g Garlic
• 2 Green Onion
• 20g Honey
• 10g Brown Sugar
• Juice from Half a Lemon
• 10g Vinegar
• 40g Water

Directions

1. Measure and put all the ingredients into a blender and blend
2. Let the foam settle, after 10 mins or so, stir the foam and bits into the sauce if it doesn't mix in on it's own
3. Use right away or save in fridge or freezer. Shelf life is shorter then what you buy because there's no preservatives

Simple right? :)

Enjoy!