Food with My Dude #10: 10-Minute Beef Teriyaki Skillet

I totally didn’t plan this to be #10 until I was editing my blog posts last month, and we made this recipe, so go me! Now, it’s intentional, haha. This was our first time making this recipe, so we were taking a chance on how it would taste. I had Stephen look up a dish to make and we decided on this one.

10-Minute Beef Teriyaki Skillet

Now, the final product may look like the Korean Ground Beef bowl that I posted about a few weeks ago, but this is actually a different recipe. I can’t remember how Stephen found it, but it takes us a little longer than 10 minutes — but that’s not a bad thing!

Here is the meal’s recipe:

• 1 lb. extra lean ground beef [I use 80%.]
• 1 cup finely diced onion
• 1 teaspoon minced garlic
• 1 teaspoon minced fresh ginger [we used ¼ teaspoon dried ground ginger]
• ¾ cup thick teriyaki sauce* such as Soy Vay Veri Veri Teriyaki Marinade & Sauce
• Optional garnish: sliced green onions and toasted sesame seeds
• Serving: rice tortillas, or lettuce wraps

*We used this Simple Teriyaki Sauce recipe since we didn’t buy the type of teriyaki sauce listed in the original recipe. So, we got a little more creative and took it a step further!

Here’s the recipe’s ingredients for the sauce:

• 1 cup water
• 1/4 cup soy sauce
• 5 teaspoons packed brown sugar
• 1 tablespoon honey, or more to taste
• 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
• 2 tablespoons cornstarch
• 1/4 cup cold water [this one used when mixing in the cornstarch.]

Price:

It may seem like a lot, but it was a super cheap meal to make!

Cooking the Homemade Teriyaki Sauce

The teriyaki sauce is super easy to make. You just combine the majority of ingredients together as they heat up on the stove:

• 1 cup water
• 1/4 cup soy sauce
• 5 teaspoons packed brown sugar
• 1 tablespoon honey, or more to taste
• 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1/4 teaspoon garlic powder

Wait until this mixture heats up and the ingredients dissolve.

Mix:

• 2 tablespoons cornstarch
• 1/4 cup cold water

Then when the sauce is bubbling, pour in the cornstarch/water mixture.

After a few minutes, the sauce will thicken!

Of course, if you choose store bought teriyaki sauce, you can disregard this section completely.

Cook That Beef!

These three ingredients go in with the beef as it’s cooking. You know the drill: cook until the meat is brown and the onions are slightly yellow from being cooked.

Just because I like dirtying up dishes, sometimes I’ll cook the onions and meat separately since I’ll have to drain the beef and onions just get in the way. Completely up to you, but I’ve found it to be easier for me.

Then, drain the meat once it’s browned. Finally, using our own teriyaki sauce, we pour it over the beef! The recipe calls for ¾ cup, but the sauce is just slightly over that amount, and why let it go to waste? So, ¾ cup and whatever’s remaining of the sauce and it makes no difference!

If you follow the exact recipe, there is way less sauce, and it just looks like beef.

All easy enough, right? Here’s the final product. Crazy how similar it is from the other dish, huh?

Update on This Recipe

Funny enough, I made this dish again last night, and I did a few things differently. I made this without Stephen, and had it ready for him since he was working a bit later I kept the sauce on the stove longer, and I made a tad bit more because I thought it could use more sauce.

You’ll have to excuse the lack of meat in the picture. I didn’t think of snapping a picture until we already dished some out, but you can tell how much of a huge difference more sauce was for the dish.

Okay, I’ll admit that I initially thought I had put too much cornstarch in it for it to be too thick, and I started to worry that it was going to ruin it somehow. I was totally wrong, because keeping it on the stove longer for it to become thicker was so much better! I also let it cook on low for a few minutes as I sauced the beef. This was such an improvement.

Here’s how it turned out:

It looks so much more appetizing than the first one! I’m just going to rule out the 10 minute cooking time because I don’t think you can with the changes we made of this recipe to get the same result, but I prefer this method.

Taste: [The first time making it]: This dish has a much more neutral taste to it, which we found to be a better alternative to the Korean Beef dish that was on the sweeter side. To me, it has a fainter soy sauce flavor and the honey seems to balance the taste out well – and I hardly like honey, haha.

[Second time]: The sauce was so much thicker, which made the dish have more flavor, by far. I also cooked the meat a little longer, which caused it to be more tough than the first time, and I didn’t break it up as much whenever I initially started cooking it.

Rating:

The first try, I give it 4 stars. The rating has improved, and I now give it a 5 star.

Heat level:

0! Just a lightly sweet teriyaki dish.

Not too much of a complicated meal to make. You can choose your preference on which you like better for the previous Korean Beef dish or this one, but we are leaning more toward this one. I think making our own sauce was such a better idea than store bought.

Would you make your own sauce or just go with store bought?

Hope you all are having a wonderful week so far!