Bourbon Barrel Foods was built around a singular purpose: creating the perfect Kentucky-made soy sauce. Once we had that down, the next step seemed obvious. Teriyaki sauce.
Classic teriyaki is already soy sauce-forward. Add mirin, sugar, sake (or in our case, bourbon), and you have something clean and sweet that works on just about any protein.
We swap out the sugar for Kentucky-grown sorghum, add a splash of bourbon instead of the usual sake, bring in fresh garlic and ginger, and you have something that doesn't exist anywhere else. That's Kentuckyaki.
What It Tastes Like
Kentuckyaki tastes like teriyaki found its way to Kentucky and never left.
The garlic and ginger give it a punch upfront, while the sorghum sweetness lingers without taking over. The bourbon settles underneath everything, but with a little warmth and oak that rounds out the edges, while the umami from the soy sauce runs through all of it.
What to Do With It
Our favorite use for Kentuckyaki? Slathering it on a nice piece of salmon. Brush it on, let it sit, cook it however you prefer: the sweetness caramelizes, the ginger cuts through the richness of the fish, and the whole thing comes together faster than you'd expect and better than it has any right to.
But you can use it to enhance just about any protein you feel like cooking up.
On chicken thighs, Kentuckyaki does something special in the last few minutes of grilling when the heat tightens the sauce into a lacquered finish.
On skirt steak, it works as both marinade and finishing sauce. Use it before and after cooking, and you get two different expressions of the same flavor.
In a stir-fry, a few tablespoons in the wok ties everything together.
It's an all-in-one sauce. The seasoning, the fresh garlic and ginger are already in there, making it easier with a lot less chopping. It's all you need.
That’s the great thing about Kentuckyaki. It’s useful in a way that most specialty sauces aren't. We think of it as a culinary building block, not just another condiment.
The Bigger Picture
Teriyaki from Kentucky might sound surprising, but it all starts with high-quality soy sauce, and from there the logic follows naturally.
Bourbon country has always been about honoring a tradition while letting the place itself shape the outcome, the barrels, the water, the grain, the patience.
Kentuckyaki is that same idea applied to your weeknight dinner. Local sorghum instead of refined sugar, Kentucky bourbon instead of sake, a soy sauce that spent a year in a barrel before it ever touched a bottle.
None of it is arbitrary, all of it is intentional, and the result is something that could only come from here. That's the story we're bringing to your table, and salmon is a pretty great place to start.