DIY Benihana Recipes You Can Make at Home (2024)

FAQs

What is the secret ingredient to restaurant fried rice? ›

Cooking bits of chopped vegetables, seasoning, soy sauce, and oil, seems easy enough. However, when making fried rice at home, there's one ingredient you may be overlooking: Sugar.

Once the rice is mature, each grain is harvested and carefully dried to maintain an ideal moisture level. This ensures perfect, tender and fluffy Benihana rice once it's cooked by our master teppanyaki chefs. At Benihana, creating classic flavors that guests crave means using quality ingredients for each recipe.

The squirt bottles are sesame oil, soy sauce, and Japanese barbecue sauce (like Mr. Yoshido brand or the brand name “Japanese Barbecue Sauce”). The enormous mountain of butter is homemade garlic butter made with a garlic paste and kosher salt.

While not every recipe calls for this fried rice trifecta, many of our favorites do. Why? Soy sauce is the salt element, rice vinegar gives the dish a touch of brightness, and sesame oil lends an utterly delicious, toasty note.

Signature flavor

You can even mix in things like garlic powder, ginger root, or Sriracha sauce and chili pepper for a bit of a kick. Gluten Free Tip: to make your dish Gluten Free, instead of soy sauce, use tamari or coconut aminos for great flavor without the gluten.

Garlic – You can increase the garlic in the recipe if you like the garlicky flavor. Egg – Use any variety of eggs to make this recipe. Butter – Hibachi fried rice recipe gets most of its flavor from the butter; therefore, a lot of butter is added. Butter gives it a nice savory flavor that makes it irresistible.

In the United States, teppanyaki (more commonly known simply as hibachi) was made famous by the Benihana restaurant chain, which opened its first restaurant in New York in 1964. Though Benihana cooks their food teppanyaki-style, they also serve dishes such as hibachi steak and chicken.

All cuts of beef at Benihana are USDA Choice, meaning they are tender, juicy and flavorful.

Named after his parents' Tokyo coffee shop, Benihana opened in 1964, featuring an authentic Japanese farmhouse interior and food prepared on steel teppanyaki grills right in front of customers. His highly trained teppanyaki chefs delighted customers with intricate knife work and theatrics.

To create the signature pyrotechnic, the chef slices an onion, and then arranges the rings in a tower formation. After dousing the stack with clear alcohol, such as vodka or sake, he sets it on fire. Most chefs also grind pepper over the lit onion in order to encourage the beloved inferno.

What is the brown sauce used in hibachi? ›

The traditional Japanese Hibachi Brown Sauce, also known as “Yum Yum Sauce” or “Hibachi Sauce,” is usually vegan-friendly. The primary ingredients in this sauce are soy sauce, mirin (a sweet rice wine), dashi stock (made from dried bonito fish flakes or kelp), garlic, ginger, and sometimes a touch of sugar.

The answer: high heat, expert tosses, and something known as 'wok hei. ' As J. Kenji López-Alt writes for Serious Eats, expert cooking with a wok (and the gas range it requires) is one of the main reasons that fried rice from a Chinese restaurant tastes so much better than what you can make at home.

Use cold, leftover cooked rice.

Left in the fridge overnight, the rice grains will firm up, making it easier to separate and decreasing the chances of your fried rice turning out mushy. If you can't wait, air freshly-cooked rice to remove moisture and refrigerate the rice for a few hours before cooking.

Dark mushroom soy sauce is what gives this fried rice its rich brown/caramel colour. This soy sauce doesn't add much to the saltiness but is used to give dishes that nice caramel brown colour. Dark mushroom soy sauce also adds a hint of umami to a dish, but not much saltiness.

Sesame oil.

I do not recommend omitting or substituting the sesame oil in this recipe. It is key to the authentic flavor of this dish.