Teriyaki Chicken Thighs

If you love restaurant-style teriyaki chicken and want to make it at home, you’ve found the right recipe! This simple teriyaki chicken recipe is made with boneless, skinless chicken thighs and a few pantry staples.

Video: Making Teriyaki Chicken Thighs

What Is Teriyaki?

Teriyaki is technically the cooking method, usually grilling or broiling food with a glaze made with soy sauce. Here in North America, we think of any dish with Teriyaki sauce as a teriyaki dish even if it’s prepared differently. 

Teriyaki sauce traditionally is made with soy sauce, mirin or sake, and sugar in Japan. There are many variations around the world though. My version uses soy sauce, brown sugar, cornstarch to thicken, rice wine vinegar, garlic, and ginger. It’s full of delicious flavor and uses ingredients you probably already have. If you don’t have all of those things, don’t worry since I give some substitutions below.

What Kind Of Chicken?

I use whole boneless skinless chicken thighs for this teriyaki chicken recipe. Why? Not having to cut it up saves time and effort. The cooking time doesn’t end up being much longer either. Just make sure your chicken thighs are unrolled and flat, not folded into bundles as they are sometime sold. If they’re in bundles, just unroll them. Unrolling them not only helps them cook more quickly, it also gives more surface are for the sauce.

If you’d prefer bite-sized pieces, you can cut the chicken before cooking it. You will find that it probably only has to cook until well-browned on the outside on both sides before the pieces are no longer pink inside. My Chinese Garlic Chicken recipe cooks chicken cut into pieces like that and it only takes 5-7 minutes total to cook the chicken through.

Sometimes the chicken thighs in a package are of uneven sizes. If you want them all to be of similar size for serving everyone similar portions, cut the flat pieces in half widthwise. I use a pair of clean kitchen sheers to do this, but a knife works too.

You can use chicken breasts instead of thighs, but you’ll want to either use cutlets or thin down the breasts either by pounding them to 1/4 inch thickness, or slicing through them with knife parallel to cutting board. If you don’t do this, the thicker part of the breasts will take too long to cook and your sauce will be burnt and the thinner ends of the chicken will be dry. So, do cutlets or cut into bite-sized pieces before cooking.

Ingredient Substitutions

This is one of those recipes that I whip up all the time without even checking to see if I have the right ingredients. The reason is that it’s pretty flexible and there are lots of swaps you can do. Here are some that I’ve used:

Soy Sauce: You can use regular or low-sodium, or you can use tamari. If you don’t have those things, you can use 1/4 cup of beef stock or broth (or make it up from bouillon) and add in a tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce or a teaspoon of fish sauce.

Brown Sugar: You can use white sugar or honey in place of the brown sugar.

Cornstarch: If you don’t have cornstarch, just omit it. It is there to thicken the sauce, but the sauce ends up thick and adhering to the chicken fairly well without it.

Rice Wine Vinegar: Use almost any kind of vinegar that you have. It’s such a small amount that it won’t matter much. The only one I’d avoid is Balsamic vinegar just because it has such a strong and distinctive taste.

Fresh Garlic Cloves: You can use 1 and 1/2 teaspoons of garlic powder in places of the garlic cloves.

Ground Ginger: You can use 1 teaspoon of minced fresh ginger instead of dried ground ginger. If you don’t have ginger, you can use 1/8 teaspoon of ground cloves or of cinnamon.

Vegetable Oil: You can use whatever kind of cooking oil you usually use for sauteeing.

Finally, if you want to make this a bit spicy, you can add red pepper flakes, hot sauce or Sriracha to taste.

How To Cook Teriyaki Chicken Thighs

For this recipe, we’re cooking the chicken in a skillet on the stovetop. Get started by making the Teriyaki sauce by whisking together the soy sauce, brown sugar, cornstarch, vinegar, minced garlic, and ground ginger, or whatever ingredients you’re using.

If the chicken thighs are tucked into bundles, unroll them and put into the soy sauce mixture then flip them around to coat them all evenly.

Heat some vegetable oil in a large non-stick skillet over medium-high heat. The reason to use a non-stick skillet is that there’s sugar in the sauce and it will likely caramelize and stick to the pan. This is fine, but it’s going to be way easier to clean up from a non-stick surface than from one that sticks.

Add the chicken thighs in a single layer, and drizzle any remaining sauce from the bowl over them. The sauce is delicious, you don’t want to waste any!

Cook until well-browned underneath, 3-4 minutes. Flip and cook until well-browned on the second side, another 3-4 minutes. Reduce heat to low and cook, flipping every 2-3 minutes, until no longer pink inside, about another 6-8 minutes of cooking.

Serving Teriyaki Chicken

I like to sprinkle the chicken with some green onions, and sometimes sesame seeds, before serving. Try serving on top of rice with a side of veggies, like this Air Fryer Broccoli, for a complete meal.