Teriyaki Steak — The Flavor That Carries the Chain Forward

The Powell's reading. March 20th. The room was full — seventy people in the reading room at Powell's City of Books, the cathedral of Portland bookstores, the place where I have browsed and dreamed and imagined and never, not once, imagined myself standing at the podium, holding my own book, reading my own words to seventy strangers who have come to hear about a grandmother they never met and a soup they may never taste.

I read the miso soup chapter. My voice shook. My voice always shakes. The shaking is the honesty. I read about the three AM kitchen and the chipped bowl and the kombu soaking overnight and the sound of a spoon stirring miso into dashi, which is the quietest sound in the world and also the loudest, because the quiet sound carries everything: the grief, the love, the practice, the dead woman standing behind me in the kitchen that does not exist anymore, watching, not smiling (Fumiko rarely smiled), but nodding. The nodding was the approval. I told the audience about the nodding and the room was very quiet and the quiet was the nodding, the room nodding, seventy strangers nodding with a dead woman they had never met.

Afterward, I served miso soup. Real miso soup, in paper cups, made that morning with my homemade miso. Seventy people stood in the reading room at Powell's and drank miso soup from paper cups and the drinking was the reading, the tasting was the understanding, the soup was the book. Every person who drank the soup held the book in their hands — the physical book and the liquid book, the words and the flavor, both, simultaneously, both true, both the story.

Miya was there. She sat in the front row with Lin and Rachel and she watched me read and she watched the audience drink the soup and she said, afterward, in the car: "Mama, all those people came to hear about Obaachan's soup." Yes. All those people. Seventy people. For a soup they'd never tasted, made by a woman they'd never met, described by a granddaughter who learned to read her handwriting. The chain. The chain holds. The chain holds seventy people in a bookstore on a Tuesday night in March.

The miso soup that night at Powell’s was Fumiko’s — her proportions, her patience, her silence stirred into every cup. But when I got home and Miya was finally asleep and the paper cups were long gone and the room had stopped being a cathedral and had become just a kitchen again, I made teriyaki steak, because teriyaki is the other language of that inheritance: the soy, the mirin, the heat that caramelizes into something lacquered and ancient-feeling, the same Japanese pantry, a different sentence. It felt right to cook something from that same shelf of memory, something that did not shake but seared — a steadier flame after a night of trembling.

Teriyaki Steak

Prep Time: 15 min + 30 min marinating | Cook Time: 12 min | Total Time: ~1 hour | Servings: 4

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 lbs flank steak or sirloin steak
• 1/4 cup soy sauce
• 2 tablespoons mirin
• 2 tablespoons sake (or dry sherry)
• 1 tablespoon honey or packed brown sugar
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 teaspoon fresh ginger, finely grated
• 1 tablespoon sesame oil
• 2 green onions, thinly sliced, for garnish
• 1 teaspoon toasted sesame seeds, for garnish

Instructions

1. Make the marinade. In a small bowl, whisk together the soy sauce, mirin, sake, honey, garlic, ginger, and sesame oil until the honey is fully dissolved.
2. Marinate the steak. Place the steak in a shallow dish or zip-top bag and pour the marinade over it. Turn to coat evenly. Marinate at room temperature for 30 minutes, or refrigerate for up to 2 hours for deeper flavor.
3. Bring to temperature. Remove the steak from the marinade and let it rest at room temperature for 10 minutes before cooking. Reserve the marinade.
4. Cook the steak. Heat a cast-iron skillet or grill pan over high heat until very hot. Add the steak and cook 5—6 minutes per side for medium doneness, adjusting for thickness. The marinade will caramelize into a dark, glossy crust.
5. Reduce the reserved marinade. While the steak cooks, pour the reserved marinade into a small saucepan. Bring to a boil over medium heat and simmer for 3—4 minutes until slightly thickened. Set aside as a finishing glaze.
6. Rest and slice. Transfer the steak to a cutting board and let it rest for 5 minutes. Slice thinly against the grain.
7. Serve. Arrange slices on a platter, drizzle with the reduced glaze, and garnish with sliced green onions and sesame seeds.

Nutrition (per serving)

Calories: 290 | Protein: 36g | Fat: 12g | Carbs: 7g | Fiber: 0g | Sodium: 710mg