Published January 1, 2005. From Cook's Illustrated.
We sampled seven leading brands to find our favorite.
Considering that a great teriyaki sauce can be had in a mere five minutes with six not terribly exotic ingredients, bottled sauces can hardly boast convenience. But how do they taste? We sampled seven leading brands to find out.
Our 19 tasters had difficulty identifying many of these sauces as teriyaki. Several brands resembled hoisin, oyster, or even barbecue sauce. Only three met tasters' standards for tasting like teriyaki sauce. A second tasting pitted the winner against our homemade teriyaki sauce. Our judges deemed it harsh in comparison to the brighter-tasting and better-balanced sauce we had made ourselves.
