Bigly Teriyaki Chicken

Teriyaki. Teriyaki! The greatest teriyaki chicken in the history of teriyaki chicken, and that history is LONG, and I've been studying it. Scientists — and I've talked to scientists, very smart people, the smartest — confirmed for me that 'teri' means shine and 'yaki' means grill. Shine-grill. SHINE. GRILL. The Japanese named the dish after the LIGHT bouncing off it. That's poetry. That's also lunch. Nobody does compound words like the Japanese. Hand on heart.

Here is the problem we have. We have a teriyaki EMERGENCY in this country. Every mall food court, every airport kiosk, every sad plastic-windowed restaurant under a highway overpass — they take a piece of dry chicken, they dump a quart of corn-syrup-brown-goo on it, they call it teriyaki, and they ask you for nine dollars. Nine dollars! For chicken in molasses. That's a crime against the Japanese people, who have been making teriyaki sauce out of FOUR INGREDIENTS for hundreds of years — soy, mirin, sake, sugar. Four. That's it. Anyone who adds pineapple juice or cornstarch or ketchup to teriyaki should have their stove taken away from them. Game over.

Real teriyaki is balanced. It's salty AND sweet AND a little boozy from the mirin, and when you reduce it in the pan it goes GLOSSY, it lacquers up, it shines like a wet car in a magazine ad. My version uses chicken thighs because thighs are the king of chicken parts — the breast people have been wrong for forty years, they will continue to be wrong, I am not here to negotiate — and you sear them, you glaze them, you slice them, you eat them. Big strong men come up to me, tough men, men who never cry, and they say 'I didn't know chicken could be this good.' I say 'Now you do. You're welcome.'

That's teriyaki. Real teriyaki. Glossy, balanced, four ingredients, ready in fifteen minutes, beats the food court into the ground — it's not even close, it's a slaughter, the food court should be writing you a check. Eat it over rice. Put a little extra sauce on the rice. The rice deserves it. The rice has been waiting patiently. And next time some kiosk hands you a styrofoam tray of brown-goo chicken, you slide them this recipe and walk away — slowly, dramatically, like the credits are about to roll. You're welcome.