Yum Yum Sauce • Shrimp Sauce • Sakura Sauce • The Recipe Finally Revealed
If you've ever tried to make Japanese white sauce with a cheap store brand mayo, a low-fat substitute, or Miracle Whip, you already know the result is disappointing. The sauce tastes wrong. It might be close in color, but the flavor and texture are off in ways that are hard to pinpoint but impossible to ignore.
That's because mayonnaise is not just an ingredient in this sauce. It is the sauce. Everything else (the tomato paste, the butter, the sugar, the garlic, the paprika) is layered on top of a mayonnaise foundation. Get the foundation wrong and the whole thing falls apart.
Americans think of mayonnaise as a condiment, something you spread on a sandwich or use in potato salad. In Japan, mayonnaise is something closer to a religion.
Japanese mayonnaise, most famously made by the Kewpie brand, is a cultural institution. It appears on pizza, inside sushi rolls, drizzled over takoyaki (octopus balls), mixed into pasta, and used in a dizzying variety of applications that most Americans would never consider. The Japanese consume mayonnaise at a per-capita rate that rivals or exceeds American consumption, which is saying something given how much Americans love the stuff.
Kewpie mayonnaise differs from American mayonnaise in a few notable ways. It is made with only egg yolks rather than whole eggs, which gives it a richer, creamier texture and a more pronounced flavor. It uses rice vinegar or apple cider vinegar instead of distilled white vinegar, which produces a slightly different tang. And it contains no added sugar, relying on the natural richness of the egg yolks for its characteristic taste.
Kewpie is now widely available in the United States, but this recipe was developed long before that was the case, and the original version served at American Japanese steakhouses was almost certainly made with American mayonnaise. The restaurants needed a sauce that could be made with ingredients available in bulk at American food service distributors, and Kewpie was not on that list in the 1970s and 1980s.
Hellmann's Real Mayonnaise (sold as Best Foods west of the Rocky Mountains) is the standard for this recipe because it is a high-quality, consistent product with a clean flavor that doesn't overwhelm the other ingredients. Its emulsification is stable, which means the sauce is unlikely to separate when you add the water and butter. And its flavor profile (eggy, slightly tangy, with good body) provides exactly the right canvas for the tomato paste and spices.
Do not use low-fat mayonnaise. The fat is not optional. It is responsible for the texture and mouthfeel that makes this sauce distinctive. Do not use Miracle Whip, which contains added sugar and artificial flavors that will produce a noticeably different and inferior result. Do not use cheap generic brands, which may taste more aggressively of vinegar or have less stable emulsification.
One thing that surprises people about this recipe is the instruction to refrigerate the sauce overnight before serving. This is not a suggestion. The flavors in a mayonnaise-based sauce need time to come together: the garlic needs to mellow, the paprika needs to bloom, the butter needs to fully incorporate, and the overall flavor needs to round out from a collection of separate ingredients into a unified whole.
Taste the sauce immediately after making it and it will taste sharp and disjointed. Taste it the next day and it will taste like the sauce you remember from the restaurant. The overnight rest is the step that most copycat recipes skip, and it is the step that explains why most copycat recipes don't quite work.
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