Eel sauce is our new favorite cooking hack for making any dish sweet and savory with zero hassle

Here are five app-eel-ing side dishes, rice bowls, and sweets for using up your leftover eel sauce.

Unagi no tare (うなぎのたれ), literally “eel sauce,” has become our favorite all-around sauce.

While the product may or may not contain small amounts of eel extract itself, it’s intended to be a perfectly thick, glossy accompaniment for grilled eel made from a simmered blend of soy sauce, mirin, sake, and sugar.

Many commercially prepared versions exist, such as the one from Japanese brand Nihon Shokken, pictured below. ▼ Nihon Shokken’s eel sauce This particular one does contain a tiny amount of eel extract but it’s not one of the top three ingredients.

From the top those are soy sauce, mizuame (a Japanese sweetener), high-fructose corn syrup, and mirin, all ahead of the extract.

It was one of these bottles that we had purchased for use in one recipe but ended up having a decent amount of leftover sauce.

Not wanting to waste it, we began experimenting with what we could use it on besides eel.

It turns out that the sky is the limit when it comes to eel sauce’s potential–here are five ways to add it to easy Japanese homestyle dishes and snacks.

1.

Grilled onigiri (rice balls) First up is an easy and satisfying snack.

Simply mix the eel sauce into the rice before shapjng the onigiri .

We also threw in some leftover green onions and roasted sesame seeds for extra flavor.

Grill the onigiri in a pan or air fryer until you start to see faint scorch marks on the rice.

The resulting snack has a deeper and richer taste than if using soy sauce alone.