Hoisin Sauce (Better than Store-Bought)

Hoisin sauce has quickly become one of my favorite homemade sauces. Our homemade hoisin sauce tastes so much better than store-bought! Use this incredible sauce in stir-fries, marinades, and glazes.

Store-bought hoisin tends to be excessively salty, overly sweet, and disappointingly thick. Our homemade hoisin sauce recipe tastes sweet, salty, tangy, and downright delicious. Use this umami-rich sauce for chicken, salmon, ribs, tofu, and veggies.

Since perfecting this recipe, we’ve explored so many ways to use it. To date, we’ve used it to make glazed salmon, tossed it with tofu, and used it for hoisin sticky ribs. We also love using this sauce to make these chicken lettuce wraps.

Key Ingredients

• Garlic, ginger, and green onion: Add fresh flavor to our sauce. I especially love the ginger in this homemade sauce.
• Light tamari or soy sauce: The foundation of our sauce’s salty, savory flavor. Light tamari offers a cleaner taste, but light soy sauce works nicely.
• Maple syrup and molasses: Sweeten our sauce and balance the salty tamari.
• Peanut butter: Makes the hoisin taste more complex. However, the finished sauce does not taste like peanut butter. You can substitute tahini or almond butter.
• Gochujang: Replicates the complex flavor of fermented beans in traditional hoisin sauce. For a substitute, use miso paste and add a dash of your favorite hot sauce for optional heat. We also use gochujang when making our easy shrimp marinade.
• Rice wine vinegar: Just a little vinegar brightens the sauce and brings all of the flavors together.
• Chinese Five Spice: A warm and fragrant blend of star anise, fennel, Szechuan peppercorns, cloves, and cinnamon. Look for this in the spice aisle of most grocery stores.
• Cornstarch: Thickens our sauce (optional, but recommended).

How to Make Hoisin Sauce

It only takes about 15 minutes to make hoisin sauce at home. You’ll need a small saucepan and a spoon or whisk.

To make it, sauté fresh garlic, ginger, and scallions until softened, then stir in everything left on your ingredient list. The peanut butter melts into the sauce, and the garlic and ginger perfume the sauce nicely. It tastes intensely flavorful.

Our recipe includes cornstarch, which helps thicken the sauce. You can stick with our suggested amount or add more for a thicker sauce. (As written, the hoisin is slightly thinner than you might find with store-bought.)

We worked on this recipe with Chef Richard Hattaway, and I could not be happier. This hoisin sauce makes weeknight dinners so easy. Whenever I have something like chicken or tofu in the fridge and have no idea what to do with it, I reach for this sauce. Toss whatever you have in the fridge in some sauce and bake. Easy!

Storing Homemade Hoisin Sauce

Homemade hoisin sauce can be refrigerated for up to 1 month. As it sits, it may separate. We store our sauce in an airtight glass jar, which allows us to shake it to combine before using it. The sauce also freezes well. Keep it in a freezer-safe container in the freezer for up to 3 months.