Japanese classic unagi sauce has a pleasant complex flavor with salty, sweet and spicy notes and a "trail" of haze. It is often used for sushi, rolls, but it is simply indispensable for dressing properly cooked smoked eel. Unagi - a multi-component sauce. It contains starch and yeast extract (for thickening), as well as water, sugar, rice vinegar. But other sauces, in particular, soy and mirin, are also the obligatory ingredients of unagi. In the Land of the Rising Sun, there are many varieties of these last two components.
Is it realistic to make unagi sauce at home? “No,” say sushi bar owners who are interested in attracting customers. "Yes," say true connoisseurs of Japanese cuisine. In principle, there is nothing complicated technologically. Ingredients in a certain sequence are placed in a saucepan, boiled, and at the end, starch diluted with water is added. Soy sauce is not a problem right now. From the storey abundance, choose "Classic", without extraneous flavoring. Mirin, in fact, is a sweet rice wine. On the shelves of specialized boutiques, you can find its three varieties: hon (stronger), sio (with salt) and syn (non-alcoholic). If you do not find the first type, you can use the other two. And also, to be honest, unagi sauce will not go bad if you replace mirin with dry white wine.
If you are preparing a dressing for smoked eel, finely chop a small portion of the fish. Pour 160 ml of water into a pan, a glass of soy sauce, add 150 g of sugar, 240 g of mirin or wine and eel. When your unagi sauce begins to boil, bring the fire to a minimum, cook for another eight minutes. Need to stir constantly! Now you can add starch diluted with water and cook for about five minutes until the mixture thickens. Experts advise filtering the sauce.
There are other recipes for making unagi. One of them recommends preparing the sauce along with a suitable dish. Leek and carrots finely chop. Pour a glass of mirin and sake into a saucepan, put 100 g of honey, a little sugar, chopped vegetables and eel. We put on a small fire and continuously stir this mixture. After boiling, continue to cook for another ten minutes. After this, unagi sauce should be filtered, since vegetables are useless there - they have already given their flavor to dressing.
According to the third recipe, alcohol (mirin and sake) is first poured into a saucepan and boiled until the alcohol contained in them is evaporated. Then sugar is poured and stirred until crystals are completely dissolved. Next on the scene is soy sauce. After the liquid has boiled 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 make unagi sauce. But how to use it correctly? For a dish, eel unadon is cut and unfurled longitudinally. Pieces of fish are placed on a greased foil and baked at a very high temperature for 7 minutes. Then the eel is smeared with a brush with unagi sauce, put back into the oven for just a minute. Boiled rice is placed in a bowl. It is watered with the remaining unagi, pieces of fish are laid out on top.