Tube Steaks and Teriyaki Make Shoyu Weenies

Shoyu weenies with grated carrot and scallions for garnish.

Shoyu weenies with grated carrot and scallions for garnish.

The past couple of weeks, two young women, cousins, who grew up together in Fresno, California, have stayed with me as part of their summer adventure as volunteer members of World Wide Opportunties in Organic Farming, or WWOOF. I have had so much fun with Chloe Nakagawa and Deanna DesRouchey. Not only are they stellar weeders, but Deanna knits (and I do, too,) and Chloe plays the ukulele. They have brightened up our household and the local social scene, too, among our island twenty-and early-thirty somethings.

I asked them about what they ate when they were at home that they could make for a supper here for us. I’m not sure how Shoyu Weenies came up, but both Chloe and Deanna laughed and talked about their childhood memories of them. Chloe even had a picture of the dish on her phone to show me. Shoyu weenies is teriyaki sauce with sliced hotdogs served over rice with a sprinkle of chopped vegetables like scallions or broccoli. The word shoyu means soy sauce, a key ingredient in the teriyaki sauce.

“I can’t even remember a time when we didn’t eat shoyu weeneies,” Chloe said. For a family of five, hotdogs economically replaced more expensive meat or fish. It was a very quick supper. The recipe came via her dad’s side, from his parents Bachan, grandma, and Gichan, grandpa, Nakagawa, who were among many Japanese people interned in American concentration camps during World War Two. Chloe’s dad thinks possibly Bachan may have adapted American hotdogs to Japanese taste while they were interned.

Since Chloe’s and Deanna’s moms are sisters and the families lived next door to each other, the recipe spread from the Nakagawas to the DesRouchey’s. Deanna says she makes Shoyu weenies for herself when she has been concentrating on her work and suddenly finds herself hungry She recalls that her mother used to buy huge jars of teriyaki sauce at Costco to use in this and other dishes. But Chloe made teriyaki sauce from scratch for us when she and Deanna made supper.

It is so good because we like hotdogs here. I’ll make it again. For one thing, I love having a homemade teriyaki sauce; and it is pretty novel to eat hot dogs and rice together.

Shoyu Weenies

As many hotdogs per person as you think necessary

Teriyaki Sauce for cooking and more to add later

Cooked white rice.

Sliced scallions.

Other steamed vegetables of your choice (broccoli, peas, carrots, optional)

Slice the hotdogs diagonally. Warm the teriyaki sauce in a frying pan, and add the hotdogs to it. Cook together until the hotdogs are hot, and darker in color. Put the rice in a bowl and top with teriyaki and hotdogs. Sprinkle on scallions and vegetables and serve with additional teriyaki sauce.

Chloe’s Teriyaki Sauce
 
Ingredients
  • ½ cup soy sauce
  • 1 ¼ cup water
  • ½ teaspoon ginger
  • 1 garlic clove minced
  • 8 tablespoons brown sugar
  • ¼ cup cold water
  • 2 tablespoons cornstarch
Instructions
  1. Mix the soy sauce, water, ginger, garlic, and brown sugar together in a saucepan and heat the mixture on the stove over a medium temperature.
  2. Whisk together the water and cornstarch and slowly add to the soy sauce mixture, constantly stirring.
  3. Cook until it thickens, adding more water if necessary to keep it from becoming sticky.
  4. Set aside to use later or store in a jar.

 

 

Sandy Oliver

About Sandy Oliver

Sandy Oliver Sandy is a freelance food writer with the column Taste Buds appearing weekly since 2006 in the Bangor Daily News, and regular columns in Maine Boats, Homes, and Harbors magazine and The Working Waterfront. Besides freelance food writing, she is a pioneering food historian beginning her work in 1971 at Mystic Seaport Museum, where she developed a fireplace cooking program in an 1830s house. After moving to Maine in 1988, Sandy wrote, Saltwater Foodways: New Englanders and Their Foods at Sea and Ashore in the 19th Century published in 1995. She is the author of The Food of Colonial and Federal America published in fall of 2005, and Giving Thanks: Thanksgiving History and Recipes from Pilgrims to Pumpkin Pie which she co-authored with Kathleen Curtin. She often speaks to historical organizations and food professional groups around the country, organizes historical dinners, and conducts classes and workshops in food history and in sustainable gardening and cooking. Sandy lives on Islesboro, an island in Penobscot where she gardens, preserves, cooks and teaches sustainable lifeways.