Jii-jii’s Teriyaki Steak
I was low to the ground on my Big Wheel, racing around the concrete courtyard between my grandparents’ house and the duplex at the back of their lot. Jii-jii was at the green kettle charcoal grill. I did laps through the smoke, bathing in the smell of charred sugar and soy sauce.
Jii-jii never spoke much to us kids. A stroke had left him irritable and paralyzed on one side. But when I drew up plans for things, he built them. A ramp for my bike. A contraption that held a volleyball up high so I could practice spiking. The rest of what I knew about him I knew from watching: he grew vegetables, and he grilled teriyaki flank steak for family get-togethers. That was my template for what Japanese American men did.
After he died, my Uncle Marc tried his hand at the teriyaki, but it wasn’t quite the same. Before I knew it, I was graduating college. Then twenty-five years passed.
I remember a Post-it note at my mom’s house. Four ingredients, in her handwriting – soy sauce, sugar, garlic, white pepper. No measurements. No instructions. I’m not sure it still exists.
Last weekend I bought a 2.3-pound flank steak from Whole Foods. I’ve mostly been doing dry rubs lately – garlic powder, salt, pepper, maybe a little coconut sugar. But that four-ingredient recipe has been stuck in my head for all these years. It was time to give it a go.
I sliced the flank steak the way I remembered it – thin, across the grain, into strips like thick-cut bacon. For the marinade, I had the four ingredients but no amounts. So I asked Alexa – 2/3 cup soy sauce, 2 tbsp sugar, 3-4 cloves of minced garlic, and 1 tsp white pepper. I added a couple of green onions, thickly sliced.
White pepper was the one ingredient I wasn’t sure about. Turns out it was the standard pepper in Asian American kitchens of Jii-jii’s era – it gives the dish an earthy warmth without taking over the way black pepper would.
Sunday afternoon around 4:30, I lit a charcoal chimney filled to the brim. When the coals on top turned ashy on their corners, I poured them into my black Weber kettle grill. The first strips went down with a hiss, and there it was – charred sugar and soy sauce. A few minutes per side, pulled when the edges were dark. The flavor wasn’t exactly his, but it was close enough.
I called Kai over to try a slice fresh off the heat. He placed it gingerly in his mouth and walked off with a “Mmmmmm!” At dinner, the question, more than once: “Why have you never made this before?”
