Having a soup base on hand that allows you to prepare noodle soups in 15 minutes is priceless. Dark in color with intense umami taste, tsuyu sauce combines flavors that are typical of many Japanese dishes.
What is Tsuyu (Mentsuyu)?
Tsuyu (also called mentsuyu) is a multipurpose sauce commonly used as a soup base in noodle dishes. It’s made of bonito flakes, kombu, soy sauce, sake, and mirin (or shitake mushrooms). Tsuyu is a perfect balance of sweetness and savoriness.
The salty taste of soy sauce is balanced by the sweet taste of mirin (sweet rice wine). Combined with bonito flakes and kombu, it gives you an intense umami flavor that is typical of Japanese cuisine.
What Do you Use Tsuyu For?
Tsuyu has a wide range of uses. Thanks to its combination of almost all the typical and basic ingredients of Japanese cuisine, it can be used to season many dishes. It’s often used as a base for noodle soups, such as soba, udon, or somen noodles.
Sometimes you don’t need to dilute it with much water. Then you can use tsuyu as a dipping sauce for noodles. A typical dish is cold soba noodles, which are usually prepared during hot summer days. After being cooked, the soba noodles are rinsed with cold water and served with tempura and tsuyu sauce for dipping.
Tsuyu is also used in various simmered dishes and hot pot dishes, where various ingredients such as tofu, meat, and vegetables are cooked together in one pot and you can use tsuyu to achieve that nice umami flavor.
How to Make Tsuyu?
Tsuyu is prepared in a concentrated form and is then diluted with water depending on the desired intensity of flavor. In Japan, people probably wouldn’t make tsuyu at home as they would simply buy the sauce ready-made, like soy sauce, for example. Unfortunately, I don’t have many options here. So, how can you make it at home?
The preparation is really simple and takes only a few minutes. The more challenging part will be finding the ingredients. The things you will need to make tsuyu are the basic ingredients of Japanese cuisine. But once you get them, it will be relatively easy for you to prepare several Japanese dishes.
For tsuyu, you will need soy sauce, katsuobushi (dried bonito flakes), sake, mirin, kombu, and dried shiitake mushrooms. Shiitake is a less common ingredient for tsuyu sauce. It depends on personal preferences, so you can leave it out of the recipe.
How to store tsuyu?
Homemade tsuyu can last in the fridge for about a month. I recommend storing it in a glass jar and writing down the date when you made it. It’s a handy helper that quickly and easily enhances many dishes, and you can prepare noodle soups in 10-15 minutes with it.
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Japanese Soup Base Tsuyu
Video
Ingredients
- 60 ml sake
- 140 ml mirin
- 130 ml soy sauce
- 3 g kombu
- 5 g bonito flakes
- 1 shiitake (3 - 4 g)
Instructions
- Gather all ingredients.
- Put all ingredients into a pot and slowly bring it to a boil over medium-low heat. Then, reduce the heat to low and simmer for 5 minutes.
- Use a a fine-mesh sieve to strain the mixture. You will get approximately 220 ml of sauce which should be enough for four portions of noodle soup.
- TIP: To get more deep and rich flavor, put the kombu kelp back into the sauce and leave it there overnight or you can soak the kombu kelp in soy sauce before cooking it.
- TIP: You can use the leftover kombu and bonito flakes as a topping over freshly cooked rice.
Itadakimas!
