How to cook an authentic Japanese unagi sauce at home?

Japanese classic unagi sauce has a pleasant complex taste range with salty, sweet and spicy notes and a "train" of haze. It is often used for sushi, rolls, but it is simply indispensable for refueling properly cooked smoked eel. Unagi - a multi-component sauce. It consists of starch and yeast extract (for thickening), as well as water, sugar, rice vinegar. But the mandatory ingredients of unagi are other sauces, in particular, soybean and mirin. In the Land of the Rising Sun, there are many varieties of these last two components.

Is it real to cook unagi sauce at home? "No", - owners of sushi bars, interested in inflow of clients, assure. "Yes," - say the real connoisseurs of Japanese cuisine. In principle, there is nothing technologically complicated here. Ingredients in a certain sequence are laid in a saucepan, boiled, and in the end, diluted starch is added. Soy sauce now do not get a problem. From the store abundance choose "Classic", without extraneous taste additives. Mirin, in fact, is a sweet rice wine. On the shelves of specialized boutiques it is possible to find its three varieties: hon (stronger), zio (with salt) and blue (nonalcoholic). If you do not find the first type, you can use the other two. And also, if to be honest, the unagi sauce will not spoil if you replace the mirin with white dry wine.

If you are preparing a dressing for a smoked eel, cut a small fraction of the fish. In a saucepan, pour 160 ml of water, a glass of soy sauce, add 150 g of sugar, 240 g of myrrh or wine and eel. When your unagi sauce boils, bring the fire to a minimum, boil another eight minutes. You need to stir constantly! Now you can add diluted starch and cook for about five minutes until the mixture thickens. Experts advise to strain the sauce.

There are other recipes for cooking Unagi. One of them recommends preparing the sauce along with a suitable dish. Leek and carrots finely chopped. In the pan pour a glass of myrina and sake, put 100 g of honey, a little sugar, cut vegetables and eels. We put on a small fire and stir this mixture continuously. After boiling continue to cook for another ten minutes. After that, the unagi sauce should be filtered, as there is no need for vegetables - they have already given their flavor to the dressing.

According to the third recipe, first pour alcohol (myrin and sake) into a saucepan and boil until the alcohol contained in them is evaporated. Then sugar is poured and stirred until the crystals dissolve completely. Next on the scene is soy sauce. After the liquid boils again, reduce the heat and cook for about twenty minutes. In theory, the sauce should thicken. If this does not happen, we resort to the help of starch. Now we know how to cook unagi-sauce. But how to use it correctly? For a dish, unadon eel is cut longitudinally and unfolded. Put pieces of fish on oiled foil and bake at a very high temperature for 7 minutes. Then the eel is smeared with a brush of Unagi sauce, put back into the oven for just a minute. Boiled rice is put into the bowl. It is watered with the remaining unagi, the pieces of fish are laid out on top.