Yum Yum Sauce • Shrimp Sauce • Sakura Sauce • The Recipe Finally Revealed
Ask most people where yum yum sauce comes from and they'll say Japan. They assume it's a traditional Japanese condiment that traveled to America along with the teppanyaki cooking style. The sauce has an exotic mystique about it, a secret recipe that restaurants won't share, a flavor that seems impossible to replicate at home.
Here's the truth: yum yum sauce is not Japanese. It was invented in America, almost certainly to suit American tastes, and the Japanese food culture it seems to represent has no real equivalent for it. If you visited a restaurant in Japan and asked for white sauce or shrimp sauce, you would likely receive a blank stare.
NPR's food desk investigated this question in depth. They consulted culinary experts and Japanese food scholars, and the conclusion was consistent: the sauce is a purely American creation. Elizabeth Andoh, a respected authority on Japanese cuisine, told NPR that the sauce as Americans know it (mayonnaise-based, sweet, slightly tangy, with a pink hue from tomato) is not part of any Japanese steakhouse repertoire she was familiar with in Japan itself.
The most plausible explanation is that Japanese steakhouse operators in the United States developed the sauce to satisfy American diners who wanted a rich, creamy dipping sauce alongside their grilled meats. Given that both American and Japanese food cultures have a deep affection for mayonnaise, a mayo-based sauce was a natural bridge between the two.
Japanese-American chef Koichi Maeda claimed to have invented the sauce at his Charleston, South Carolina restaurant in 1985, by stirring ketchup (or more precisely, tomato paste) into heavy mayonnaise. He reportedly intended it as a replacement for Kewpie, the beloved Japanese mayonnaise that was difficult to source in the American South at the time. Whether Maeda was truly first, or simply one of many restaurant operators who arrived at a similar recipe independently, is impossible to know for certain.
What is clear is that the sauce became particularly popular in the Southern United States, where a love of rich, mayonnaise-based condiments was already deeply established. From the South, it spread northward and westward as Japanese steakhouses opened across the country through the 1970s and 1980s.
The sauce might have stayed a local secret of individual restaurants if not for Terry Ho, a Taiwanese immigrant who settled in Albany, Georgia, and eventually owned more than twenty restaurants across the South. When Ho opened his Hibachi Express restaurant in 2003, customers were so passionate about his version of the white sauce that they brought in large containers from home to buy it in bulk.
Ho recognized an opportunity. He began bottling his recipe under the name Terry Ho's Yum Yum Sauce, first selling it in regional Piggly Wiggly stores around 2011, then expanding to national distribution in 2012. By 2021, his operation was producing roughly six million bottles of sauce per year.
It was Terry Ho's bottled sauce that gave the condiment its most widely recognized name. Before that, it was called white sauce in most places, shrimp sauce in others, and by various other names depending on the region. "Yum yum sauce" was catchy, memorable, and accurate, and it stuck.
This website, JapaneseWhiteSauce.com, published the first widely accurate recipe for this sauce in 2006, years before Terry Ho's bottled version appeared in grocery stores. The recipe was arrived at by reading the ingredient label on a commercially bottled version sold by a local steakhouse, then spending months refining the proportions through trial and error until it was right. NPR cited this site and its creator by name in their coverage of the sauce's history and cultural significance.
The core recipe (mayonnaise, tomato paste, melted butter, sugar, garlic powder, paprika, and a small amount of water) has been copied verbatim across thousands of websites since 2006. Nearly every recipe you find online for Japanese white sauce traces back to this one.
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