Adding teriyaki sauce to a dish is a good way to give a punch of flavor to any veggies, meat, or grains, but you might not always have a bottle of the good stuff lying around. While you can make teriyaki sauce with just two ingredients (sugar and soy sauce, for the curious), there’s an even easier replacement waiting for you: barbecue sauce. Barbecue sauce has a similar flavor profile to teriyaki sauce to begin with, and even though barbecue sauce and teriyaki sauce differ in ingredients, they both have relatively neutral bases, sweeteners of some sort, a bit of tang or vinegar, and savory flavor enhancers like garlic or chili powder.
When it comes to picking out which brand you want to sub in for, we have a handy list of the best and worst barbecue sauces to buy at the grocery store. A high quality barbecue sauce like Sweet Baby Ray’s will always get the job done. We do suggest that you err toward a sweeter-tasting barbecue sauce because teriyaki sauce tends to be sweeter than barbecue on a whole, but you can always alter whatever sauce you have on hand with sugar to taste.
When and how to make the barbecue swap
Despite the fact that barbecue sauce and teriyaki sauce are sometimes used interchangeably, you really won’t get a 1:1 flavor recreation with either. This means that it just won’t work in every dish you want to try it in. If you’re going for a dish where the teriyaki flavor is key, like teriyaki chicken, then you won’t really want to sub out the teriyaki sauce for BBQ. If, however, you’re just looking for a teriyaki-adjacent experience, feel free to add that BBQ sauce in to your heart’s content. It’s best to use it in multi-ingredient dishes where the sauce plays a supporting role but isn’t the star of the show, like pork or chicken stir-fry served over rice, or glazed and roasted veggies.
You can also make some adjustments to take your BBQ sauce closer to teriyaki sauce. Adding in soy sauce and sugar thins out the consistency of barbecue sauce, which is generally thicker than teriyaki. It also brings in that unique umami that comes from soy products. If it’s available to you, you can pick up a bottle of Obasan’s, the Japanese barbecue sauce brand that’s worth the hype. It’s tangier, thinner, and more umami-forward, making it more similar to teriyaki sauce from the get-go. Still, if you can’t get your hands on it, a good teriyaki sauce substitute is just one bottle of barbecue sauce away.
