Yum Yum Sauce: The Making Of An American Condiment

Enlarge this image
toggle caption
Olivia Falcigno/NPR

Olivia Falcigno/NPR

The scene is a familiar one. People seat around a orthogonal table, the majority of which is taken up by a politic iron cooktop. Gas flames flicker underneath. A man wearing a grandiloquent red hat and a egg white chef ‘s uniform approaches, pulling a cart filled with coldness food, large cook utensils and respective bottles of sauces. He holds a spatula and a big alloy branching. He brings them together : cling-clang, cling-clang. Eyes sparkling, he looks around the postpone. “ welcome to Benihana. ” More normally referred to as hibachi, japanese teppanyaki-style cook has become part of the american din know. The combination of noodles, rice, vegetables and kernel fried up on a griddle describe customers to these restaurants equally much as the brassy and flamboyant flair of the chefs cooking at the table. One of the more insidious curiosities of teppanyaki restaurants — beyond the stack onion rings of arouse and behind-the-back chuck of metallic utensil — is a creamy orange-pink sauce placed beside your steaming meal. Almost every teppanyaki restaurant will serve it, though its name differs depending on whom you talk to. White sauce ( a deceptive nickname ), shrimp sauce, delectable sauce, yum yum sauce — are all used interchangeably .

Considered by many in America to be a japanese classic ( one Reddit drug user called it “ ill-famed ” ; a blogger speculated that there are truly alone “ two types of folk music that dine at a hibachi restaurant, those that get double flannel sauce and those that do n’t know you can get double white sauce ” ), the sauce ‘s fresh, slenderly lemony season varies between restaurants and regions equally much as the name does. A little more sweet in one place. A short more relish in another. Some versions are evocative of fry sauce, popular in the South. such variety calls into motion whether the sauce we taste in our local teppanyaki restaurants is tied japanese at all. possibly not amazingly, the suffice, it appears, is no. Nancy Singleton Hachisu, writer of three cookbooks on traditional and advanced japanese cuisine, was confused when I first asked her about the sauce. She had n’t heard of it being used in Japan and actually objected to my initial motion about hibachi restaurants. “ Since hibachi is a traditional charcoal heater for the room, ” she told me, “ I can not think that Japan would yield information on this subject. ” once I sent her a description of the sauce, which I called prawn sauce and she called “ basically pink mayonnaise, ” she told me that there is no evidence of its use in japanese cuisine .

Elizabeth Andoh, who has lived in Japan for half a century and runs the japanese culinary education program A Taste of Culture, was besides puzzled. “ I do n’t know of any white sauce or shrimp sauce that is served with japanese steak, ” she said. When I prompted her with a more detail description, she responded, “ This sort of mayo-based … tomato sauce is not part of any japanese steakhouse repertoire I know of. ” And Polly Adema, director of the food studies program at California ‘s College of the Pacific, said that the sauce ‘s origins are bleary, though probably not profoundly rooted in japanese culture. possibly, she said, the sauce stems from congruent american english and modern japanese tastes for mayonnaise. Andoh did say that, in general, the Japanese are “ mayonnaise crazy. ” But such guess does n’t get you very far. “ Which came first base : an affection for mayonnaise or a mayo-enriched dish ? ” Adema asked. “ [ It ‘s ] one of those questions we may never be able to answer. ”

The recipe for the sauce is evenly unmanageable to come by. I reached out to 15 different restaurants around the U.S. — big chains and independently run joints — but each turned down my request. “ We can not divulge that information, ” a Benihana director in Maryland told me. I received exchangeable answers from a Sakura in New Jersey, an Edohana in Texas and a Flame in New York. Chuck Cutler ran into a very similar problem 25 years ago, when he inaugural tasted what he calls white sauce in a teppanyaki restaurant. “ I noticed that all the other people at the board were asking for two lawn bowling of whiten sauce … thus I tried it. I was instantaneously hooked. ” Cutler spent a ten asking different restaurants for the recipe, to no avail. “ It ‘s a japanese secret, ” chefs would tell him. One day, though, in a Florida grocery store storehouse, he stumbled across a sauce produced by a teppanyaki restaurant. He remembers it being called vegetable sauce. So he bought a bottle “ and darned if it did n’t taste precisely like what I had been looking for. ” Using the ingredients listed on the vegetable sauce bottle, Cutler was able to come up with his own recipe ( Chuck ‘s Easy Recipe ), which, in a form of retaliation against the restaurants that had rejected him, he made a web site for : Japanese-Steakhouse-White-Sauce.com. According to Cutler, it was the first well recipe on-line. Created about a ten and a half ago, the web site immediately has 229 pages of comments from visitors. There “ are thousands of comments from people all over the world saying, ‘Oh my God, I ‘ve been looking for this everlastingly, ‘ “ he said. “ ninety-eight percentage of them are positive. ” The popularity and intrigue around the sauce led one teppanyaki restaurant owner, Terry Ho, to start bottling it in bulk. Ho owns more than 20 restaurants in the South — some teppanyaki and some chinese. He has lived in Albany, Ga., since the 1970s, when his grandfather immigrated to the U.S. from Taiwan. Ho ‘s sauce is called Terry Ho ‘s Yum Yum Sauce. The name is distinctive — and a bang-up brand move. According to Ho, “ Yum Yum Sauce ” is much more appeal than blank sauce or runt sauce, neither of which is even a vaguely accurate description of the actual sauce. “ There ‘s no shrimp in this recipe, ” he said. “ Why are you calling it runt sauce ? ” Yum Yum Sauce, though, is fitting : “ Well, I mean, it tastes yummy. ” For years, Southerners who had tasted or heard about Ho ‘s Yum Yum Sauce — which he made a little differently from others ( less vegetable oil and boodle ) — would come to his restaurants asking for 16 or 20 ounces of it. He would dole it out in Styrofoam containers .

Enlarge this image
toggle caption
Terry Ho

Terry Ho

Seeing the business potential, Ho started fabricate and bottling the sauce on a multitude scale about a ten ago. Success came cursorily. The sauce worked its way to larger and larger outlets, diffusing throughout the United States. It is now sold in around 30,000 grocery stores nationally. Ho said the company is growing by 10 to 15 % every year. The sauce is besides stocked in U.S. military commissaries around the populace. “ There are people in Germany and Saudi Arabia buying the sauce, ” Ho proudly said.

“ My plan is to turn Yum Yum Sauce into the next american english condiment, ” he told me. “ We do n’t want to be just [ perceived as ] an asian sauce. We want to be the adjacent ranch. ” When I asked Cutler about Terry Ho ‘s Yum Yum Sauce, he sighed. “ I tried that one, and I did n’t think it was that great. ” But of course, he acknowledged, tastes are tastes. Different sauces will appeal to different people in different regions. The sauce — delicious as it is — is something different to everyone. It ‘s what ‘s available. What ‘s memorable. possibly tied what has the most creative list .