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Most Benihana garlic butter recipes online tell you to roast your garlic, add herbs, or throw in extra spices. The actual restaurant version uses three ingredients, and one of them is soy sauce.
I tracked down the exact product Benihana uses on their teppanyaki grills. It’s a margarine called Sunglow European Style Butter Blend. They’re not using it because it tastes better than real butter. The reason comes down to heat.
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Unsalted butter. The restaurant uses a margarine blend because of the extreme heat on their teppanyaki grills, but at home, real unsalted butter produces a better-tasting garlic butter. Let it sit at room temperature for 1-2 hours before you start.
Garlic. Fresh cloves, peeled, with the root end trimmed. For the home version, you’ll use 6 to 8 cloves. The restaurant batch uses 15. You’ll either make a garlic paste with your knife (home method) or blend the garlic in a food processor (restaurant method).
Kikkoman soy sauce. Benihana uses Kikkoman specifically. The soy sauce does double duty here: it seasons the butter and adds savoriness that plain salt doesn’t provide. Two tablespoons for the home batch, a quarter cup for the restaurant batch.
This is the home version, which makes a smaller batch without any special equipment.
Step 1: Make the garlic paste. Peel 6 to 8 garlic cloves and trim the root ends. Finely chop the garlic by rocking your knife over it, then press down on the side of the blade and drag the tip across the chopped garlic. Keep chopping and dragging until you have a smooth paste.
Step 2: Combine garlic and soy sauce. Add the garlic paste and 2 tablespoons of Kikkoman soy sauce to a container with a tight-fitting lid. Shake vigorously for 30 seconds to a minute. You’ll end up with a mixture very similar to the blended restaurant version.
Step 3: Fold into butter. Allow 3 sticks of unsalted butter to come to room temperature (1-2 hours). Using a whisk or spatula, slowly fold the garlic-soy mixture into the softened butter. Add a little at a time and make sure each addition is fully mixed in before adding more. When there’s no liquid left at the bottom of the bowl, you’re done.
For the restaurant-size batch: Use 6 sticks of butter, 15 cloves of garlic, and ¼ cup of Kikkoman soy sauce. Blend the garlic and soy sauce in a food processor or blender instead of making a paste by hand, then fold into the softened butter the same way.
Room temperature butter matters. If the butter is too cold, the garlic-soy mixture won’t incorporate evenly and you’ll end up with pockets of liquid sitting at the bottom of the bowl. Give it a full 1-2 hours on the counter before you start.
Add the garlic-soy mixture in small amounts. Dumping the entire mixture into the butter at once makes it nearly impossible to get a smooth, even distribution. A spoonful at a time, fully mixed between each addition, is how the restaurant does it.
Kikkoman is the brand Benihana uses. Other soy sauces will work, but the flavor will be slightly different. Kikkoman has a specific salt-to-sweetness ratio that matches the restaurant version.
Keep the finished garlic butter in a covered container in the refrigerator for up to one week. For longer storage, freeze for up to six months. If you’re freezing, portion it into tablespoon-sized amounts so you can pull out exactly what you need without thawing the whole batch.
You can, but reduce or skip the soy sauce to compensate. The soy sauce already provides the salt in this recipe, so using salted butter on top of that will likely make the finished garlic butter too salty.
It won’t taste the same. Jarred minced garlic has a milder, slightly acidic flavor from the preserving liquid it sits in. Fresh garlic has a sharper, more pungent flavor that you can taste in the finished butter.
No. Since this garlic butter gets melted when you use it, there’s no advantage to starting with whipped butter. Regular unsalted butter works perfectly. If you happen to have whipped butter on hand, it’ll work too.
