What Is Mirin? Types, Taste and How to Use It

True mirin starts with three ingredients: steamed glutinous rice, rice koji, and shochu or another distilled spirit. Koji is rice inoculated with Aspergillus oryzae, the same mould behind miso, soy sauce and sake, and its job here is to break the rice starch down into sugar.

The mixture is left to age, usually for a couple of months but sometimes far longer. Because alcohol is present from the start, the yeast fermentation that would normally turn those sugars into more alcohol is suppressed. The sugar simply accumulates, which is why mirin ends up sweet rather than dry and why it is closer to 14 percent alcohol than sake's 15 to 20.

The result is a clear golden syrup, noticeably thicker than sake, with a sweetness that tastes rounded and slightly savoury rather than sugary. Around a third of the sugar is glucose, which matters more than it sounds: glucose caramelises readily, and that is the chemistry behind the lacquered coat on a piece of glazed fish.

On its own, mirin is sweet and syrupy, with a mild tang and a faint fermented depth underneath that reads as savoury. It is much less sharp than you would expect from something described as a wine, and considerably thicker in the mouth than sake.

In a finished dish, though, you almost never taste mirin directly. What you notice is what it has done: a glaze that clings and shines, a simmered dish whose sweetness sits behind the soy rather than on top of it, and an overall roundness that stops a salty sauce tasting harsh.

This is why leaving it out is more noticeable than people expect. A teriyaki made without it is not less sweet so much as flat and thin, because the sugar was also providing body and shine, not just flavour.

Hon-mirin contains around 14 percent alcohol, which is comparable to a glass of wine, so yes. Shio-mirin is similar but salted so heavily that it is unpleasant to drink. Mirin-style seasoning is usually under 1 percent, and some brands are effectively alcohol-free, but rarely certified as zero.

Most of that alcohol cooks off when the dish is simmered or reduced, which is what mirin is normally used for. It does not all disappear, though. A brief glaze at the end of cooking retains far more than a twenty-minute simmer, so the amount left depends entirely on how the dish is made.

If you are avoiding alcohol for medical or religious reasons, the safest route is not to hunt for a low-alcohol mirin but to build your own from rice vinegar and sugar, where you control every ingredient. There is a full breakdown of the ratios in our guide to mirin substitutes.

The sticky soy honey chicken is the clearest demonstration of what mirin actually does, because the glaze either clings to the meat or it slides off into the pan. That difference is the sugar content doing its work as the sauce reduces.

The Japanese curry is the subtler case. Mirin is not the headline flavour anywhere in it, but a spoonful rounds off the roux and stops the spice sitting sharp and separate from the rest of the dish.

These four are shelved together and constantly confused, but they separate cleanly on two questions: is it sweet, and is it sour. Mirin is sweet and barely sour. Sake is neither, and is drier and stronger at 15 to 20 percent alcohol. Rice vinegar is sour and not sweet, with no alcohol at all.

Rice wine is the broadest term and the source of most of the confusion, because it simply means any alcoholic drink fermented from rice. Sake is a rice wine. Mirin is a rice wine. Chinese Shaoxing is a rice wine. So a recipe calling for rice wine is usually asking for whichever one belongs to that cuisine, and the answer is almost always sake for Japanese dishes and Shaoxing for Chinese ones.

Japanese recipes often call for mirin and sake together, and the pairing is deliberate rather than redundant. Sake brings the alcohol and the savoury depth, mirin brings sweetness and shine. Substituting one for the other means adding back whichever half you have lost.