Japanese Cuisine: Quick and Versatile Japanese Spicy Onion Sauce

Easily broaden your Japanese cooking repertoire by adding a few differentsauces into your rotation. A quick sauce can easily change an ordinary seafood or protein dish into a meal that suddenly seems more, for lack of a better word, fancy!

We are all familiar withJapanese condiments such as soy sauce or tonkatsu sauce which instantly adds flavor to fish or protein that's been simply cooked with salt and pepper, but honestly, our taste buds appreciate a bit of variety occasionally.

If you enjoy onions, try this recipe for Japanese spicy onion sauce, and you won't be disappointed. It's savory, with a soy sauce (shoyu) base, and sweet onions, but its flavor is more complex with the addition of oyster sauce and chili garlic paste.

What makes this sauce appealing is that it's quite quick and easy to make, in particular because it uses oyster sauce and chili garlic paste, both of which are bottled and available for purchase at Japanese or other asian grocery stores. Both of these sauces are definitely worth adding to your list of essential ingredients to keep in the refrigerator.

This sauce takes about 10 minutes to prepare and begins with sauted sweet onions in sesame oil, then the addition of flavor enhancing ingredients. The soy sauce and sugar are added last so that the soy sauce does not reduce and become salty. Depending on your preference, add more or less sugar to create a savory sweet sauce. I prefer a savory sauce and therefore used only a hint of sugar in the recipe below.

Only a small amount of the sauce is needed to season your seafood or protein. The onion sauce may be kept in the refrigerator for up to five days or stored in the freezer in small ice cube portions for future use.

Recipe and source: http://japanesefood.about.com/od/Ea...-and-Versatile-Japanese-Spicy-Onion-Sauce.htm