Making tereyaki usually involves marinating some kind of meat, but were going to do a vegetarian tereyake that doesn't require marinating and only takes about fifteen minutes. It basically involves hacking up a load of vegetables, giving them a quick stir-fry, then chucking in a sauce and simmering for a few minutes. Dead easy. And the result is very similar to the genuine article. How do I know? Because I had veggie tereyaki at the Sumosan restaurant in Almaty, Kazakhstan and the proprietor of that joint is Japanese and she's a really good cook. I guess the version of tereyaki she put on the menu might have been developed to suit the available ingredients, but she would try to make it as similar as she could to the stuff served up in Japan, right? That's good enough for me. I tried hers, I tried mine and they taste spookily similar. So, we call this recipe 'vegetable tereyake', OK?
You can muck about with the ingredients list for this recipe. I just used what I had in the fridge, but how about trying baby corn, zucchini, broccoli, bean sprouts, eggplant, or green beans? Maybe throw in a few mushrooms, too? It's the ginger, garlic, soy sauce and fruit juice that give the distinctive taste. You can also substitute pineapple juice for the orange juice, by the way.
Here's the list of ingredients and the quantities I used to feed two of us...
Ingredients
About a quarter of a firm cabbage
1 carrot
1 red pepper and 1 green pepper
2 or 3 cloves of garlic
A small piece of root ginger
1 tomato
4 or 5 tablespoons of light soy sauce
About a half cup of orange (or pineapple) juice
A pinch of salt
Oil for frying
Chop all the vegetables, except the garlic and ginger, into fairly large pieces/wedges. This will give a lovely coarse, crunchy and chewy texture to the final product. Peel the ginger and cut it into little 'matchsticks' and slice the garlic cloves.
Heat the oil in a wok or large deep frying pan and stir fry all the veg except the tomatoes, on the highest temperature. Fry for a few minutes until the chunks of veg are starting to brown at the edges and smoke a bit, then add the soy sauce and orange juice and continue stirring on the highest heat until the liquid has almost evapourated (about 2-3 minutes). Stir in the tomatoes with a little salt, cover the pan and turn the heat down a little. The tereyaki will be ready to serve after another three or four minutes.
Serve with steamed rice.
Here are a few more recipe ideas for a Japanese-themed table:
veggie sushi
marinated ginger
veggie miso soup