Why Every Skewer We Serve Is Gluten-Free

Our skewers exist in the form they do because of one night, and because of one guest I could not feed.

The Night

Emily has been coming to Juraku for years. She came in on a night that was slammed, with her mother-in-law, who has celiac disease.

I was on the hot station. If you have not worked one on a busy night, the problem is not the cooking. The problem is that everything is happening at once, on shared surfaces, with shared tongs, next to fryers and pots that have had soy sauce in them all night.

Doing that properly means stopping, breaking the station down, pulling clean equipment, and building a dish from scratch. On a slow night, fine. That night, I did not have it.

The Grill Was Clean

What I did have was the grill.

I had been wanting to put skewers on the menu for a while, and I had just finished building the thing. It had not gone into service yet. No menu items ran through it. Nothing with soy sauce or miso in it had ever touched it.

By accident, it was the one clean cooking surface in the building.

The design came from staring at a salamander, which is the gas broiler we use to crisp the tops of things like fish. It fires ceramic downward and the radiant heat it throws is intense and even in a way an open flame is not. I wanted that, but underneath the food instead of above it. It took me a while to work out how to build it upside down. The radiant element ended up being porous lava stone over gas burners, which spreads the heat evenly and gives a skewer real smoky char, close to what you get over charcoal.

So I had a clean grill and a guest I could not otherwise serve.

The Sauce

I put together a tare on the spot using gluten-free tamari, grilled some skewers, and sent them out. They were not on the menu. They were a work in progress that I had not finished thinking about.

When it slowed down enough for me to get out and check on the table, everyone had tried them. Everyone liked them. Her mother-in-law had eaten a full plate of Japanese food in a Japanese restaurant, which is not something that happens to her often.

We kept the sauce.

Soy Sauce and Tamari

Since this is the part that makes it work, it is worth explaining properly.

Regular Japanese soy sauce, koikuchi, is not just soybeans. It is brewed from roughly equal parts soybean and wheat. The wheat is not filler; it is where a lot of the aroma and the balanced, slightly sweet complexity comes from. It is also why soy sauce is off the table for anyone avoiding gluten.

Tamari comes out of somewhere else entirely. It began as a by-product of making miso, the liquid that pools in the vat as the mash ferments and settles under its own weight. That is still roughly what it is: mostly or entirely soybean, very little brewing water, and a much longer fermentation. Many producers use around nine parts soybean to one part wheat, and some use nothing but soybeans and salt. Less wheat, more soy, more time. The result is darker, thicker and deeper in umami, with less of the sharp top note koikuchi has.

Here is the part almost nobody knows. Tamari is not automatically gluten-free. Because it comes out of miso rather than out of a half-wheat brew, people assume there is no wheat in it at all. But plenty of tamari is still made with a small proportion of wheat in the mash, and shared production equipment can introduce traces even where the recipe does not.

So the word tamari on a label is not a guarantee. You want a bottle that specifically says gluten-free, ideally with a certification seal.

That is the version we buy. Not tamari, specifically gluten-free tamari, which is a different purchase and a more expensive one.

Why We Only Make One Tare

We talked about running a normal yakitori tare alongside a gluten-free one for the people who need it, and decided against it.

The reason is practical. Two sauces means two brushes, two squeeze bottles, and the same pair of hands moving between them on a busy night. One sauce takes the question off the table.

So there is one tare, it is gluten-free, and every skewer gets it. We gave something up for that. Most yakitori places let you order tare or shio, sauce or salt, and we do not. But Japanese food leans on soy sauce and miso in almost everything, and we would rather the skewer section just be simple.

What It Tastes Like

Our tare is thicker and a little sweeter than a traditional yakitori tare, with a deep, long umami that comes from the tamari.

That suits the grill. Radiant heat off lava stone caramelizes a heavier glaze rather than burning it off, so the sauce sets on the outside of the meat instead of dripping away.

A Note on Yakitori Itself

Grilled skewers go back to the Edo period as street food, chicken over charcoal with a simple sweet soy glaze, sold from stalls. It stayed a working person's food, and it is still everywhere in Japan, from roadside counters to specialists who do nothing else.

The reason it belongs in an izakaya is not complicated. It is hot, it is salty, it arrives fast, it is meant to be shared, and it goes with a cold drink better than almost anything.

What Is on the Grill

Chicken thigh, pork belly, beef skirt steak, chicken heart, kuro buta sausage, shrimp, Hokkaido scallop, squid, and for the vegetables, tomato, tofu, zucchini and mushroom. They are sold as individual skewers, so you can order four things instead of committing to one.

If you want them over rice, the Kushi Yaki Don is three skewers on a bowl.

Try It at Juraku

Skewers are on the menu at Izakaya Juraku, Lower East Side, and they became one of our top sellers, which was never the plan. They were supposed to be a small part of the menu, the same way the ramen was.

The skewers are not the only place we do this. The handrolls are served with gluten-free soy sauce as well.

If you or someone you are eating with cannot have gluten, tell us anyway, so we can point you through the rest of the menu.

Kanpai!

• Kiyo

See the rest of the menu.