Teriyaki is one of our favourite ways to enjoy Japanese food. It involves cooking ingredients in the eponymous glaze of soy sauce, rice vinegar, and sesame. Although the most common pairing to Teriyaki sauce is chicken, you can cook veggies with it too. Today, we'll show you how to make delicious teriyaki tofu, perfect on a bed of sticky white rice.
Our recipe is both vegan (meatless, egg-free) and gluten-free. Important note for celiacs: make sure you buy a soy sauce that is clearly labelled as gluten-free. You may think that soy sauce is naturally gluten-free, as it is a byproduct of soybeans. But the traditional way to prepare the sauce is to ferment the soybeans with wheat. Some labels may fail to disclose this, so make sure your soy sauce clearly states "gluten-free", if you are intolerant to gluten.
Instead of using pre-made teriyaki sauce, we'll prepare it ourselves. It's easy and quick, don't worry. To make it healthier and lighter, we reduced the fats and sugars contained in the classic sauce. We did it by halving the amount of sesame oil and replacing white sugar with maple syrup. Our teriyaki sauce is also vegan, as we used maple syrup instead of honey to make it refined-sugar-free.
We also opted to oven-bake our tofu teriyaki instead of frying it. Some teriyaki chicken recipes involve deep-frying the chicken first and then smothering it with sauce. You could apply the same technique to tofu, but we suggest you shy away from frying and stick with the oven instead, to make this a healthier meal.
Overall, this recipe is great for vegans or flexitarians with a craving for a healthier teriyaki dish. A serving of this teriyaki tofu will net you 158 calories, and cover 28% of your RDI for proteins and only 14% RDI of fats. You can make a meal out of it by serving the tofu with a bowl of sticky rice and steamed greens.
Just follow along with our easy steps below, and you'll be nibbling healthy tofu teriyaki in no time. Enjoy!
