Yakitori: Grilled Chicken Skewers With Tare

Yakitori looks simple from the outside — grilled chicken on a stick, essentially — and that simplicity is exactly what makes the good versions so hard to reproduce casually. A serious yakitori-ya doesn’t serve “chicken skewers,” it serves a dozen or more distinct cuts, each grilled to its own specific point, over binchotan charcoal that burns hotter and cleaner than most home grills can manage, finished either with salt (shio) to let the meat speak for itself or a glaze (tare) built up in thin, repeated layers rather than slathered on once.

More cuts than most people realise exist

A proper yakitori menu treats a chicken almost the way a good butcher treats a whole pig — every part gets its own name and its own specific treatment, and wasting any of it is considered a failure of the kitchen. Momo is thigh meat, the most familiar cut and the one most home versions default to. Negima alternates thigh with leek, the pairing in the recipe above. Tsukune are minced chicken meatballs, often mixed with cartilage for crunch and served with a raw egg yolk for dipping. Kawa is skin alone, grilled slowly until rendered and crisp, closer to chicken crackling than to a normal skewer. Bonjiri is the tail, prized by regulars for its concentrated fat, and sunagimo is gizzard, grilled quickly to stay tender rather than chewy. Most of these developed as a direct consequence of postwar Japan’s poultry industry expanding rapidly through the 1950s and 60s, which made chicken — previously a more occasional meat than it is now — cheap and plentiful enough to support a whole cuisine built around using every part of the bird without waste.

Before chicken took over

Yakitori as a grilled-skewer format predates its modern association with chicken specifically. Edo-period street stalls grilled all kinds of skewered meat and offal, chicken among them but not dominant, and it was really the postwar boom in commercial poultry farming that shifted yakitori firmly toward chicken as the default, cheap and consistent enough to build an entire genre of casual, inexpensive dining around. Older yakitori-ya sometimes still serve pork, beef or seasonal game on the same grill, a reminder that “yakitori” originally described a cooking method and format rather than a specific bird.

The tare that some shops never fully replace

The glaze used for tare-style yakitori isn’t made fresh each night at the most established shops — it’s a base sauce that gets topped up and reused, sometimes for years or, by reputation, decades, deepening in flavour the way a well-maintained stock or a sourdough starter does, picking up compounds from every skewer that’s been dipped into it. This isn’t practical or particularly safe to replicate exactly at home over a long period, but the principle is worth borrowing on a smaller scale: make a proper tare with real body (the recipe above simmers chicken bones briefly into it for exactly this reason), and dip skewers into it two or three times through the grilling process rather than brushing once, so the glaze builds in thin, caramelised layers instead of sitting as a single wet coat that never really sets.

Cutting chicken for even skewers

Even, consistent cooking on a skewer starts with the cut, not the grill. Chicken thigh has an uneven thickness across the whole piece, thicker at one end than the other, so cutting uniform 2.5cm pieces from a whole thigh means trimming and squaring off the thinnest and thickest ends rather than just chopping straight through — an oddly shaped, thin scrap threaded next to a thick, even chunk will finish cooking minutes apart on the same skewer. It’s worth keeping any trim rather than discarding it; small odd-shaped pieces of thigh grill up perfectly well on their own short skewer, they just don’t sit evenly alongside more uniform pieces.

Grilling technique: direct heat, close attention

Yakitori depends on close, high, direct heat — traditionally binchotan charcoal, which burns hotter and with less smoke and flare-up than ordinary charcoal, letting the chicken char and crisp on the outside without picking up an acrid, sooty flavour. A domestic charcoal grill gets reasonably close if you let the coals burn down to a steady, glowing heat rather than grilling over open flame; a cast-iron griddle pan on the stove, taken to genuinely high heat, is a workable indoor substitute, though it won’t replicate the specific aroma charcoal contributes.

Turn skewers frequently rather than leaving them to cook undisturbed on one side — yakitori is meant to char in small, repeated increments across the whole surface, not develop one deep sear on a single face. For tare-glazed skewers, the repeated dip-grill-dip cycle matters as much as the heat itself; each pass through the tare and back over the fire sets a thin layer of glaze before the next one goes on, building genuine depth rather than a single sticky coat that just burns.

Shio versus tare: two entirely different philosophies

Shio-style skewers, seasoned with nothing more than salt, put the whole burden on the quality of the chicken and the skill of the grilling — there’s no sauce to cover for uneven charring or a poorly rendered piece of skin, which is why some yakitori chefs consider shio the harder style to execute well despite its short ingredient list. Tare-style skewers give a cook more room, since the glaze itself adds sweetness, umami and a lacquered visual finish that can flatter a slightly less perfect grill. Neither style is more traditional than the other; most yakitori-ya offer both, and regulars often choose based on the specific cut rather than a general preference, ordering delicate cuts like sunagimo or negima shio-style to taste the meat clearly, and richer cuts like tsukune or bonjiri with tare to play against their natural fattiness.

Skewer management on the grill

Bamboo skewers scorch and burn at their exposed ends well before the meat is done unless you take a couple of precautions. Soak them for a genuine 30 minutes in water before threading — a quick five-minute dunk isn’t enough to stop them charring under sustained direct heat. If your grill is small, position the exposed ends together at one edge, angled slightly away from the hottest coals, or wrap the tips loosely in a strip of foil. Metal skewers avoid the problem entirely and are worth the investment if you find yourself making yakitori regularly, though they conduct heat into the meat from the inside as well, which can make thick pieces cook slightly faster than bamboo would.

What can go wrong

Dry, tough chicken almost always comes from overcooking thigh past the point it needs, or from cutting pieces unevenly so some are done long before others. Thigh meat is forgiving compared with breast, but it still dries out past a certain point — pull skewers the moment juices run clear, not later.

Tare that burns onto the skewers black rather than glazing them a deep amber usually means the sauce went on too early, before the grill had done enough of its own work, or that it was applied too thickly in one go. Grill first, glaze in thin passes, and keep a close eye once the sugar in the tare is exposed to direct heat, since it scorches fast.

Skin that stays flabby rather than crisping comes from grilling skin-side up for too long relative to skin-side down — give the skin side more direct time over the hottest part of the grill, since rendering the fat and crisping the surface is what yakitori’s textural appeal depends on.

Binchotan and why charcoal choice matters

Binchotan, the white charcoal traditionally used in serious yakitori-ya, is made from oak through a slow, high-temperature carbonisation process that leaves it burning at a very consistent, very high heat with almost no visible flame and minimal smoke. That consistency matters more than it sounds: ordinary charcoal or briquettes flare unpredictably, especially once fat starts dripping from the skewers, and those flare-ups coat the meat in acrid, sooty flavour rather than the clean char binchotan produces. If you can source binchotan (some specialist grocers and Japanese supermarkets stock it), it’s worth the extra cost and the longer time it takes to reach cooking temperature — up to 40 minutes compared with 15-20 for standard charcoal. If you’re working with ordinary charcoal, keep a small dish of water nearby to dampen down any flare-ups quickly rather than letting the flame lick the meat directly.

Building a full skewer platter

A proper yakitori spread rarely arrives as a single style or cut — even a modest home version benefits from variety. Pairing a couple of tare-glazed momo skewers with a shio-style negima and, if you’re feeling ambitious, a batch of tsukune meatballs (minced thigh, a little grated ginger and a beaten egg white worked through the mince to bind it, shaped around skewers and grilled the same way) gives a spread with the same range a small yakitori-ya would put out. Serve with cold beer or a chilled dry sake, both of which cut through the fat and glaze far more effectively than anything sweeter.

Substitutions, storage and serving

Chicken breast works if thigh isn’t available, though it needs closer attention to avoid drying out, and benefits from a shorter time on the grill and a slightly thicker cut. Pork belly or beef, cut into similarly sized pieces, both take well to the same tare and grilling method if you want to build a mixed skewer platter closer to what an old-style yakitori-ya might have served before chicken became the default.

Leftover tare keeps for weeks refrigerated, covered, and only improves with age within reason — bring it back to a simmer before reusing it on a fresh batch, and top it up with a splash more soy sauce, mirin and sugar rather than throwing it out after one use. Freeze it in small portions if you don’t grill often enough to work through a full batch before it needs refreshing. Grilled skewers themselves are best eaten immediately; reheating tends to dry the chicken further and never quite recovers the just-off-the-grill char.

For another dish that treats a specific cut of chicken as the whole point rather than an afterthought, Nagoya tebasaki applies a similarly deliberate glaze-and-char approach to wings instead of skewers. If you want a sweeter, less smoky soy glaze built the same way — reduced, then applied in stages — buta no kakuni shows the same seasoning logic applied to a long, slow braise instead of a fast grill.