Baked salmon + vegetable stir fry – in homemade teriyaki sauce

At university, I always had a bottle of readymade teriyaki sauce on hand. I would put it in fried rice, mix it in every stir-fry and just use it almost as commonly as soy sauce. For some reason, when I moved to London I stopped buying it. This only occurred to me yesterday, and so I decided to see how hard it was to make from scratch (just because I can). Turns out it’s incredibly easy! I did some research on the Internet, and this version is put together from various ones online. When it finished simmering, I tasted it and it actually blew me away. There are some cooking moments when I feel like I can rule the world, and this was one of them!

Once the sauce is made, you can store it in the fridge for up to a week. I used the leftovers today to make a beef and mushroom teriyaki, and it was just as fabulous. And with the leftovers from that, I made beef fried rice!

Serves 2 people

Sauce:

• ½ cup soy sauce
• ½ inch fresh ginger, chopped in very small pieces
• 2 cloves fresh garlic, chopped in very small pieces
• 1 tbsp honey
• ¼ cup sugar
• ¼ cup water mixed with 3 tsp flour
• 1 tsp sesame oil
• 3 tbsp rice wine (Shaoxing)
• Juice of ½ lemon

Combine all the ingredients in saucepan, bring to a boil, then reduce and simmer for about 10 minutes. Let cool.

Vegetable stir fry:

• 2 tbsp sesame seeds
• 200g mangetout / sugar snap peas
• 6-7 chestnut mushrooms
• 2 spring onions, chopped

Roast sesame seeds in 1 tsp vegetable oil, then remove and keep aside. Heat 2 tbsp vegetable oil and fry the mangetout, mushrooms and spring onion. Add 3 tbsp teriyaki sauce plus the roasted sesame seeds and serve!

Salmon:

• 2 fillets salmon

Heat oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Put baking paper on a tray and place salmon fillets on it. Drizzle with teriyaki sauce (the more, the better) and bake for 10-15 minutes until the fillets are cooked through, but not dried out.

This recipe also goes well with a simple crisp salad covered in mustard vinaigrette (we just added cucumber). That’s what we did and it was an explosion of flavour!