Sake rewards a little know-how: how to choose it, cook it, store it, and substitute in a pinch. Browse 43 recipes to cook with it.

What is sake?

Sake is Japanese rice wine, brewed from polished rice and water with the help of koji mold, not crushed fruit. It pours clear and runs around 15 to 16 percent alcohol. The taste sits between a dry white wine and a mild grain spirit, clean and faintly sweet.

In Japan it sits at the table as a drink, served chilled, at room temperature, or gently warmed. In the kitchen it is a workhorse. Most cooks reach for it far more often than they pour a glass.

Cooking With Sake

Sake does three jobs in a pot. It tenderizes meat and fish, it pulls strong odors out of raw fish and pork, and it adds a savory depth that water never will.

Splash it into a marinade and let it sit 20 to 30 minutes before cooking. The alcohol loosens proteins and carries off the funk. Many Japanese and Korean dishes start with a sake rinse or soak, including Bay of Fundy Salmon with Black Bean Sauce and Teriyaki Fish.

It earns its keep in simmered dishes too. A few tablespoons in the braising liquid for Kiriboshi (Chicken Simmered with White Radish) or Boiled Danish Squash with Ground Beef rounds out the broth.

Steaming is the other place it shows up. A pour of sake in the pan flavors both the steam and the clams or fish cooking in it.

Add it early. A minute of hard simmer burns off the raw sharpness and keeps the savory backbone.

Pairing and Common Mistakes

Sake belongs with the umami crowd: soy sauce, miso, ginger, mirin, dashi, green onion. It loves oily fish, chicken, tofu, and mushrooms. It also smooths salty soy-based sauces so they taste rounder instead of flat.

The most common mix-up is treating sake and mirin as the same thing. Mirin is sweet and syrupy with low alcohol, made for glaze and gloss. Sake is dry and meant to tenderize and deglaze.

Plenty of recipes use both. Sake cleans and softens, mirin sweetens, so swapping one for the other throws the dish off.

Skip the bottle labeled cooking sake if you can. The cheap stuff sold next to the soy sauce carries added salt, which makes it hard to season the dish yourself. A modest bottle of drinking sake is cleaner and more useful.

Substitutes

Dry sherry is the closest stand-in, with a similar savory edge and alcohol level. Use it splash for splash. Dry white wine or dry vermouth also work, though they lean more acidic and fruity than sake's clean profile.

For a non-alcoholic swap, mix water with a little rice vinegar, or use a light chicken or vegetable stock. You lose the tenderizing punch of the alcohol, so cut the amount slightly and lean on other seasonings.

Do not reach for mirin as a one-to-one sake swap. It is far sweeter, so you would need to pull back any sugar in the recipe and accept a sweeter result.

Buying and Storing Sake

Look for a bottle labeled junmai (pure rice) or ginjo for cooking and casual drinking. A dry one, marked karakuchi, is the most useful at the stove.

Unopened, sake keeps about a year in a cool, dark cupboard. It is not built to age like grape wine, so use it within a year or so of the bottling date for the freshest taste.

Once opened, sake fades. Cap it tightly and keep it in the fridge, where it holds for one to two weeks for drinking. For cooking you have more leeway, since a slightly oxidized bottle still does its job in a marinade or braise.

Sake appears in more than 40 recipes here, from sashimi dipping sauces to glazed ribs, which tells you how much quiet work it does behind the scenes.

Nutrition

Quick facts

Food group: Sake is a member of the Beverages US Department of Agriculture nutritional food group.

In Chinese

为了

British (UK) term

Sake

en français

saké

en español

sake

How much does sake weigh?

Amount	Weight
1 fl oz	29 grams

Related

Beverages

Recipes using sake

There are 43 recipes that contain this ingredient.

All 43 recipes