Tsuyu Sauce

Profile#

Here comes THE sauce to raw fish and it’s perfect for sushi and Shashimi. It’s based on our Dashi. A ‘regular’ soy sauce is way too intense for a sushi, but a tsuyu sauce is just right and it can easily be adjusted to your taste by diluting it with water. It is also because of the low effort always worth to make the sauce yourself and to enjoy it as much as the sauce served in Japanese restaurants.

Ingredients#

• 100ml Sake
• 100ml soy sauce, preferably a mild one, which is more often called light.
• 100ml dashi according to my recipe here. If you don’t have the ingredients, you can also use instant dashi.
• 2 tablespoons honey
• 200-400ml water to dilute

Let’s go#

A mild soy sauce, sake, dashi and some honey is all you need. The dashi here came from the freezer and was thawed during the day. Alternatively, you can use maple syrup or molasses instead of honey (see Christof’s variation at the end of this article).

First, bring the sake to a boil and simmer for about 2 minutes so that the alcohol evaporates.

Then add dashi, soy sauce and the honey and simmer very lightly for 2 minutes.

The finished tsuyu is very intense and can be diluted with water. I added 200ml of water, but you can add up to 400ml.

Bottled in a screw-top jar or as here, in a small sealed vial, it can be kept in the refrigerator for about 2 weeks.

Christof takes a slightly different mixture, but it also tastes great. Instead of honey he uses molasses and instead of Dashi he mixes directly with water. So here is his mixing ratio:

• 100ml soy sauce
• 100ml sake
• 100ml water
• 1 tbsp molasses

Mix everything together and heat to about 70° - 80°. It must not boil. Hold the temperature for about 10 minutes and then let cool.