Omakase Sauce Recipe

Omakase is not a sauce but a way of ordering: it means leaving the choice to the chef. The sauce brushed on the fish at an omakase sushi counter is nikiri, a soy sauce simmered with mirin, sake and dashi. To make it, simmer ten tablespoons of soy sauce with two of dashi and one each of mirin and sake for five minutes, then cool it.

What omakase means, and which sauce that is

Omakase translates as "I'll leave it up to you". At a sushi counter it means the chef decides what is served and sends it out one piece at a time, already seasoned.

That seasoning is the sauce in question. At such a counter the chef typically brushes each piece of nigiri with nikiri, a sweetened, cooked soy sauce, so that it arrives finished and needs no dipping. Sushi Modern's guide to nikiri describes it that way, and CooksInfo gives the proportions used in the recipe here: soy sauce, dashi, mirin and sake at 10 to 2 to 1 to 1.

Recipe

Omakase Sauce (Nikiri)

Nikiri, the glaze a sushi chef brushes on nigiri at an omakase counter — soy sauce simmered with dashi, mirin and sake. About three-quarters of a cup.

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Prep

5 min

Cook

5 min

Total

20 min

Serves

12

Cuisine

Japanese

Ingredients

• 1 tablespoon mirin
• 1 tablespoon sake
• 2 tablespoons dashi
• 10 tablespoons (150 ml) soy sauce

Instructions

1. Bring the mirin and the sake to a simmer in a small saucepan over medium heat and let them bubble for 1 minute, to cook off the alcohol.
2. Add the dashi and the soy sauce, bring the pan back to a bare simmer and cook gently for 3 to 4 minutes. Do not let it boil hard.
3. Take the pan off the heat and let the sauce cool completely, about 15 minutes. It is used cold.
4. Brush a thin layer on each piece of sushi or sashimi just before it is eaten.

Nutrition

Calories:

10

Calculated from the ingredient quantities above using the USDA FoodData Central database, then divided by the number of servings. It is an estimate and will vary with the exact products you use.

Two ratios for nikiri

Published versions differ mainly in how much mirin they use, which decides how sweet and how thick the sauce is.

Version	Soy sauce	Mirin	Sake	Dashi	Result
CooksInfo, used here	10 parts	1 part	1 part	2 parts	thin, mostly savoury
Sushi Modern	1 cup	1 cup	1 1/2 tablespoons	1/4 cup	reduced for 15 to 20 minutes; thicker and sweet

The thin version is the one for brushing on raw fish. The reduced one is thicker and sweeter.

Dashi in two tablespoons

Dashi is the stock of kombu seaweed and bonito flakes, and the recipe needs very little of it.

• Instant: dissolve a pinch of instant dashi granules in 2 tablespoons of hot water.
• Kombu only: steep a 2-inch piece of kombu in 1/4 cup of hot water for 10 minutes and use 2 tablespoons. This keeps the sauce vegetarian.
• None: use water. The sauce is flatter but still works.

How to use nikiri

Brush it on thinly with a pastry brush, or dab it on with a fingertip, just before the piece is eaten. One coat is enough, and there is no dipping afterwards. It also seasons sashimi, plain rice bowls and grilled fish.

For steak, the comparable finishing sauce on this site is the zip sauce, which is built on butter instead of soy.

Keeping it

Two weeks in a closed jar in the refrigerator. For other soy-based sauces, there are the P.F. Chang's lettuce wrap sauce, which is sharper and spicy, and the sweet and sour sauce in the P.F. Chang's sweet and sour chicken.