The Mystery of Japanese "Sauce"

Miso, soy sauce, bonito flakes…these are the kinds of ingredients you’d expect to be used in Japanese recipes. But there’s another ingredient that appears very often, and it’s usually just called “sauce” or so-su (???). What is this “sauce” anyway?

This is the most popular brand of Japanese “sauce”, although there are several other makers. It features a picture of a Bulldog. Some people call all “sauce” Bull-Dog sauce.

On the English version of the Cookpad site, it was decided early on to call it “Japanese Worcestershire-style sauce”. It does indeed taste like that classic English sauce made with mystery ingredients including anchovies, but it’s a lot thicker, sweeter, browner. “Sauce” appears on all kinds of foods, from Japanese hamburgers (which are more like ‘hamburger steaks’ rather than American burgers)…

…to okonomiyaki…

…and a lot more. Besides being used as, well, a sauce, it’s also used to add flavor to stews and soups, in marinades, and a lot more.

So what is this “sauce” anyway? While there are variations, called tonkatsu sauce (used on tonkatsu or breaded deep fried pork cutlets); chuunou sauce (pictured above) which just means ‘medium-thick’ sauce, usta- sauce, which is the Japanified version of Worcestershire (but usta- sauce is nothing like original Worcestershire sauce); okonomiyaki sauce, and so on. There’s little difference between them though, except in the degree of sweetness, and a slight difference in fruitiness and viscosity. Most “sauces” list “vegetables, fruit and spices” as their ingredients, plus amino acids (umami), sweeteners, caramel coloring and other things depending on the type.

“Sauce” apparently made its debut in the late 19th century in Japan, when it was sold as a different kind of soy sauce. This didn’t work out well, since it tasted so different from well, real soy sauce. “Sauce” really only took off in the post-World War II era, along with the rapid growth in popularity of westernized or yohshoku (yoshoku) cooking, which had previously been limited to the big cities.

While it’s still associated with yoshoku, as its use on things like okonomiyaki and takoyaki shows it’s now used as a flavoring ingredient for all kinds of cooking. For example the Japanese version of stir fried noodles, yakisoba, is flavored with “sauce”, unlike the Chinese version (lo mein) which is flavored with a soy sauce base.

Well..it all depends on how much it costs for you. If you live near a Japanese, Korean or general-Asian grocery store, and it’s fairly inexpensive, then by all means have a bottle around. You can use any brand you like, although Bull-Dog brand is quite reliable. (Bull-Dog sauce apparently used to be called “Inu-jirushi So-su”, which means “Dog Brand Sauce”. I think the name change was a good idea…)

“Sauce” can be used for things other than Japanese food - on all kinds of meaty or deep fried dishes, in stir fries, and so on.

As I mentioned above, I don’t think there’s a big enough difference between the “sauce” types to require stocking up on all of them, unless you want to of course or can spare the cash and space. Okonomiyaki sauce is sweeter and thinner than chuuno sauce for example, but there’s not a big difference. See below for ideas for doctoring any kind of “sauce”. For what it’s worth, right now I have one bottle of chuuno sauce in my fridge.

If you don’t have a Japanese/Asian grocery store near you, you can substitute other brown sauces. Traditional British Worcestershire sauce (such as the one from Lea and Perrins) is a great sauce and flavoring ingredient to have around anyway, but it’s not really a good substitute for Japanese “sauce”.

For that purpose I have at various times used A-1 Steak Sauce in the U.S., and HP Sauce in Europe. (Here in France, the latter is sold in our local supermarché in the “ethnic” food section.)

Both are a lot tangier than Japanese “sauce” though, so you need to temper it a bit. Adding sugar works, but molasses or golden syrup may work better. You can try adding some grated apple (a sweet variety, not a sour cooking variety) too. For okonomiyaki, you may need to add sugar or other sweetener in a 1:2 ratio of sweetener to sauce to come close to commercial okonomiyaku sauce. Or, if you like your okonomiyaki with mayonnaise too, add a bit more mayo to neutralize the sauce’s tanginess. Of course if you like tangy sauce anyway, you can just use one of those sauces straight.

I have seen a few recipes suggesting oyster sauce as a “sauce” substitute, but to me the flavor profile is quite different, so I recommend one of those sauces mentioned above instead.

[By the way, I’m boosting up my ‘Japanese ingredients explained’ section. If you need a Japanese ingredient explained in detail, and you can’t find an explaination here yet, just let me know and I’ll see what I can do.]

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The House Vermont Curry Mystery

Hi everyone! I am back home now after a week in the hospital. More about that later perhaps, but for now I am trying to catch up around here. My usual monthly article for The Japan Times appeared last week, and it was all about Japanese style curry. If you’ve ever wondered how curry got to be so popular in Japan, and why Japanese curry is so, well, different from curry you get elsewhere - head on over there and take a look. (I especially loved finding out about the Great Curry Scandal of 1931.) It has a recipe for a proper, rich beef curry using curry mix (curry roux), which is the easy way to do things of course. (If you’re interested in a from-scratch curry recipe, check out the Beef Curry recipe right here on this site, as well as my Dry Curry recipe. And if you have leftover curry and are feeling ambitious, I have a recipe for Curry Bread (kareh-pan) too!

As I delved into the history of curry in Japan while doing research for the article, I ran across the answer to a question that’s been nagging me mildly forever. Why is House Vermont Curry called Vermont Curry? If you’re unfamiliar with Vermont Curry, it’s the most popular brand of curry roux in Japan (according to the manufacturer, House Foods). Here’s the Japanese packaging:

And here’s the English packaging, which is the one you see more often when Vermont Curry is for sale outside of Japan. I’ve also seen packaging in Chinese and Korean. Have you seen it in other languages?

As I stated in the Japan Times article, Vermont Curry was introduced in 1963 as a “sweet” or mild version of curry, suitable for kids to eat. It really achieved its purpose and then some, as it really helped “curry rice” to become one of the most popular kids’ foods in Japan, rather like hot dogs and pizza are for American kids. The popularity of Vermont Curry was really solidified in the 1970s, when singer Hideki Saijo (still often just known as Hideki) became the face of the brand - a role he was to continue in for 12 years. Here’s a typical Hideki TV commercial from the ’70s. It contains the image of runny honey being poured over a sliced apple with Hideki singing ringo to hachimitsu toro-ri toketeru (“Apple and honey smoooothly melted in”) which came to really symbolize the brand. The guy in the inset is an older Hideki looking at his 18 year old self. (Click here if you can’t see the embedded video.)

And in this version (which I can’t embed at all unfortunately), Hideki even lives in a cute little apple house in a snow-covered landscape - presumably, Vermont.

Looking at the list of ingredients in Vermont Curry, honey and apple are indeed listed - along with tons of other recognizable and unrecognizable stuff. This is an industrially produced food product after all.

So, why Vermont? The Green Mountain state is certainly not known for their curries I don’t believe. The key, as you have probably guessed, is the apple and honey part - but why specifically Vermont, a relatively obscure (for non-Americans anyway) state? Even most Americans in 2011 don’t think “Vermont” first and foremost when apples are mentioned. Well, it’s all because of a health fad of sorts that was very popular back then. In 1958, D. C. Jarvis, a country doctor in Vermont, published a book called “Folk Medicine: A Vermont Doctor’s Guide to Good Health”, which stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 2 years, and was (according to the good doctor’s Wikipedia page still in print up until 2002. You can still get a used copy now. One folk remedy that particularly captured the imagination of people was the use of a mixture of apple cider vinegar and honey, called honegar, for anything that ailed you. The popularity of this magical mixture eventually spread to Japan and was known as the “Vermont Health System (????????)”. So when House Foods introduced their special, sweet and smooth curry in 1963 (even though the mix includes other sweetening agents besides honey and apple), they latched onto this “healthy” combination, blithely changed the apple cider vinegar to plain apples, and voila! Vermont Curry was born. Isn’t marketing just grand?

Nowadays of course, barely anyone remembers just how widely popular “honegar” was, though the popularity of using apple cider vinegar, or other vinegars for that matter, as home health tonics lingers on. (Readers have pointed out that honegar is still available in some areas.) The most recent ‘healthy’ vinegar fad in Japan was for kurosu or “black vinegar”, an aged rice vinegar. This stuff was wildly popular as a weight-loss aid until around 6-7 years ago, and they still advertise “40 year-aged” kurosu and kurosu supplements on Japanese TV. (My favorite happens to be kurosu flavored candy, which probably defeats the ‘healthy’ purpose.) Thankfully perhaps, no black-vinegar flavored curry mix emerged from the fad.

Vermont Curry is now available in three degrees of spiciness - amakuchi (Mild or Sweet), chuukara (Medium Hot) and karakuchi (Hot), but to me the one real Vermont Curry is the Mild one, which can be served to a small child or an excessivly timid-about-spiciness adult without compunction.

Incidentally, manga and anime fans may know Hideki Saijo via the Chibi Maruko-chan series, which is set in the mid-’70s when his popularity was as its peak. Hideki is still in showbiz, though he’s transitioned into becoming a TV presenter and occasional actor (he’s not too bad either) rather than a pop singer.

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Mystery X Cookies – Oatmeal Honey Chocolate Chip Cookies

don’t forget the milk

Rummaging through our kitchen’s “don’t know where else to put it” box, we pulled out this mysterious cookie recipe. It was written in a clean gracefully-looping woman’s handwriting with nothing more than very basic ingredients and instructions. Neither of us had a clue who had given it to us, but that’s not about to stop us from trying a new cookie recipe.

The recipe reminded us of these fantastic “Cowgirl Cookies” we get bakery whenever passing through Bishop, CA. Oats, honey, raisins, chocolate chips, sunflower seeds, coconut flakes.  It was like a perfect batch of trail-mix “cookie-fied.” We were out of sunflower seeds, but we made due without for the virgin batches.

Immediate consensus on the freshly baked cookies was “deliciousness.”  Of course nearly every cookie is delicious warm out of the oven, but even by the end of the day we couldn’t keep ourselves from overindulging on the chocolate chip laced addictive nuggets.

The honey is the main sweetener in the cookies, lending them a soft texture and nectar sweet flavor. It gives a nice change to normally sugar sweetened cookie. Sometimes we forget how tasty honey can be.  Occasionally we’ll switch to using honey for sweetening our morning cappuccinos to complete a perfect morning wake-up.

Thank you Mystery X person, who ever gave us the recipe.  This one is getting a regular spot in our cookie rotation.

- Todd and Diane

 Print This Recipe

Honey Oatmeal Cookie Recipe
Feel free to add nuts, change or add to the dried fruit, or macerate the dried fruit to make the cookies just how you like your favorite trail mix. This recipe is a good starting point. Makes approx. 48 cookies.

3 1/2 c (235g) old -fashioned Rolled Oats
1 c (150g) Raisins
1 c (80g) unsweetened dried Coconut Flakes
1 c (175g) semi-sweet Chocolate Chips
1 3/4 c (200g) all-purpose Flour
1 t (5g) Baking Soda
1 t (5g) Sea Salt

1 c (340g) Honey
1 c (225g) unsalted Butter, melted
2 t (10ml) Vanilla Extract

1.  Combine all of the dry ingredients together in a large bowl. Combine all of the wet ingredients together.

2. Add the wet mixture into the dry mixture and stir just until fully incorporated. Cover and refrigerated for at least 30 minutes.

preheat oven to 350 °F. Line a sheet pan with parchment paper or silpat

3. Roll the cookies into balls and stagger on lined sheet pan. Bake for 12-15 minutes or until just set.

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