King Oyster Yakitori
At this point in my recipe development career, the question is not so much what else can I do up yakitori-style, but what haven't I already been done? My yakitori list has grown quite large with the likes of chicken, mochi, wings, beef, tsukune (meatballs), etc. It's probably actually time I just leave this category of Japanese cooking alone and move along to other things, but that can be a challenge when yakitori is so good and so simple that it's something I constantly want to return to. And I've done that yet again, this time with king oyster mushroom yakitori.
This recipe is actually "yakitori-style" since yakitori really is confined to grilled chicken. The grill is also the only other real requirement—a basting sauce is not always used in yakitori, however my encounters with this dish always has a savory and sweet glaze, so that's always what I've done. The most common sauce is tare, which is more-or-less like a teriyaki sauce that can really be customized to each chef's personal preference. Both sauces have a base of soy sauce, mirin, sugar, and sake, but tare is often built upon from there with additional seasonings. I was pretty happy with my original take on tare, which adds scallions, white pepper, vinegar, garlic, and ginger into the mix, so haven't really strayed much from that in each subsequent yakitori recipe I've done.
The fodder for the tare this time around were king oyster mushrooms, which I go back and forth calling king trumpets too—same thing. These have been my go-to grilling mushroom in recent years because their size makes them well suited for the job and they taste really great with a little char and smokiness mixed it. I used "baby" king oysters for this recipe, so all I had to was give them a light brushing before putting them on skewers to remove some stray dirt, but if you pick up the larger version, they can still be skewered easily by cutting them into smaller sections first.
After skewering, I merely gave the shrooms a light brushing of oil before setting them over indirect heat on the grill. I let them cook, covered, until they started to brown and were tender throughout.
At that point I moved the skewers over direct heat and brushed the mushrooms all over with the tare. While some sauce slid off, enough stuck and set to give the king oysters a decent coating that caramelized in spots while the mushrooms also picked up some spotty charring around the caps.
And, unsurprisingly, the tare worked its magic yet again and rendered these mushroom skewers damn delicious. I thought the earthy and woodsy flavor was actually an even better compliment for the sweet and savory tare than chicken is, and the mushrooms had a light enough touch to them that you could taste the underlaying complexity of the sauce with notes like ginger and white pepper coming out the most. The mushrooms were also quite filling, making their heartiness on par with the more common chicken skewers. I had originally planned on making smaller, single serving skewers of these, and that was really the only thing I wish I had changed because I'm sure I would have gotten a photo whose looks would have better matched the great taste.
