Yakitori ( Japanese chicken skewer) from scratch

Dated back in 2018, when I dined in a yakitori restaurant with a friend after staying in Japan for roughly a month. I fell in love with the taste of yakitori.

Yakitori refers to the chicken skewers. In those restaurant, you’ll not only find the chicken skewers but as well the skewers of the chicken organs.

I wanted to make yakitori for a long time. I went back to Budapest after my trip to Japan. Made a facebook invitation and threw a yakitori party at my house.

Though I didn’t have the coal grill at home, and it wasn’t allowed to grill with coal( I was living in an apartment block with no balcony). I used the oven instead. Though the taste wasn’t as good. I couldn’t replicate the taste of Japan by using oven alone.

I happened to have ingredients on my hand this time. I use chicken thigh for the skewer. The most important part about yakitori is its sauce!

I followed some recipe from the internet and adjusted it by how I like at the end.

For the sauce, I use:

70 ml Soya sauce( I picked the Bonito soya sauce for its sea flavor)
50 ml Mirin( any mirin from supermarket)
30ml Rice wine( or Sake)
Brown sugar ( a few tea spoon)
Spring onion
Miso( a spoon of it)
Water ( I dilute the sauce with water so it doesn’t taste too salty)

Added all the ingredients and brought it to boil for 10mins. The sauce becomes thick and smells really good!

Chicken: For the chicken thigh, I got those from costco. The boneless chicken thigh came in 6 packages were ao easy to cut. I cut the chicken into longer pieces so its easier to put it onto the skewers.

Skewers: soak the skewers into water for more than 30mins. This will prevent the sticks to get burned from the fire.

Coal and fire: I set up the coal grill on my own. I got those cheap, easy to set up grills that only came with a base and a top net. I crashed the coals into smaller pieces so its easier to fit into the grills.

I used the tinder to set the fire and arranged the coals built on top of it. So the air could flow in and out.

After heating up the coals, making sure the coals were hot and burned. It’s red and hot. You could then spread the coals equally to sites of the grills. So the heat would be equal for every corner.