Rich, thick, salty, and sweet, best grocery store teriyaki sauce sauce is a mouth watering addition to any meal. Can’t you just imagine dipping a fluffy bao bun into a dish of hoisin, and letting the flavor explode on your tongue?
What is the best substitute for hoisin? Can I substitute Worcestershire sauce for hoisin? Can I substitute teriyaki sauce for hoisin sauce? How do you make hoisin sauce from scratch? Most of us here in the west don’t have hoisin sauce on our regular grocery list. It’s one of those ingredients that are used more infrequently, so it’s easy to let our supply dry up without realizing it.
Or worse, you know you have a bottle of hoisin sauce in the fridge, but you reach back there to get it from the back of the bottom shelf and realize it’s expired. First of all, you can make homemade hoisin sauce if you have the ingredients on hand or can find them. If you can’t, you can use any of the substitutions in our list. Or biting into a juicy roast pork, coated in lashings of hoisin? Even from a bottle, the intense and complicated flavor of hoisin feels decadent.
Sadly, most of us don’t own an unending supply of hoisin, although that would be the stuff dreams are made of. Instead, we have to deal with the endless frustration of reaching into the back of the fridge only to discover the bottle was drained on its last use. So what to do when you’re out of hoisin and a recipe calls for it? Or if you’re looking to cut back on sugar and noticed just how much is in a store bought sauce bottle?
Replacing hoisin in a dish is difficult but not impossible. If you need to substitute, don’t be expecting an exact match. There really is nothing quite like it. However, with a few tweaks and changes you can make something pretty similar. Or at least tasty enough you don’t care about the differences. Hoisin is a fragrant sauce often found in Cantonese cuisine.
Sweet and salty, it can be used as a marinade or glaze for many types of meat. Versatile enough for use in stir fries and curries, it can also be used as a dipping sauce. Traditionally made from a base of bean paste, the taste of hoisin plays with sugar, vinegar, salt, and the savory umami taste of soybean. Chinese term for seafood sauce, it contains no seafood. Largely considered as the Chinese equivalent of barbecue sauce, hoisin works well with a variety of meats. From pork to duck, hoisin is a tasty companion. It can even elevate basic vegetable dishes into a treat.
Hoisin sauce is vegetarian and normally vegan. If you’re buying from a store, double-check the bottle. Some companies can use animal products as setting or thickening agents. Due to its unique taste, hoisin is a very difficult flavor to substitute. As a warning, anything you try to use instead will alter the flavor of the dish. That’s not to say that if you have no hoisin there’s nothing to be done, but be prepared to play with flavors. Good alternatives include barbecue sauce and black bean sauce.