Try this homemade hoisin sauce once and you will never want to use a store bought one again. This is a flexible recipe that you can customize based on the ingredients you have on hand.
Why would you ever want to make hoisin sauce at home when you can easily get it from an online store or any Asian market? The answer is that it tastes a hundred times better. The end.
Hoisin sauce is very popular in southern Chinese cooking. As a northerner myself, I seldom use it. If I need to enhance the flavor of a dish with a sauce shortcut (like in this recipe), I’ll use oyster sauce most of the time. However, hoisin sauce does play an important part in making marinades and glazes, such as that for Chinese BBQ.
It never occurred to me that someone might want to make hoisin sauce at home, until a reader mentioned to me that it could be pretty expensive to purchase, depending on where you are. Plus, it doesn’t make sense to buy a big bottle of it when you just need a tablespoon for a special recipe.
When I tried to make a small batch of hoisin sauce last week, I was even more convinced of how great an idea it was. The homemade version uses better quality ingredients, such as honey, natural peanut butter, and fresh garlic. It has a superior flavor compared to the bottled one. I wouldn’t say the homemade version tastes 100% identical to a supermarket-bought hoisin sauce, but it adds a great subtle flavor to the dishes I used it in and I was very satisfied with the taste.
After some research, I found that the only problem with making this sauce is that you need to use another sauce as an ingredient. Most of the recipes online call for hot sauce, sriracha, or miso. Its sounds strange. But the problem is that real hoisin sauce gets its flavor from fermented beans, and it’s quite difficult to create this subtle hint from most of the basic spices found in the average pantry.
In the end, I decided to use the hoisin sauce recipe from Food.com as a base. I divided the base into four parts and experimented with miso, doubanjiang (Chinese spicy fermented bean paste), Thai chili sauce, and gochujang (Korean spicy fermented chili paste) to complete the various trials. In the end, miso paste and doubanjiang created the taste most similar to hoisin sauce. However, all of them yielded satisfying results.
In this recipe, I listed all four options. Depending on what do you have in your pantry, you can easily make a great tasting hoisin sauce in 5 minutes!
More recipes to use your hoisin sauce
- Chinese BBQ Char Siu
- Hoisin Roasted Asparagus
- Chicken Lettuce Wrap
- Slow Cooker Spare Ribs in Plum Sauce
If you give this recipe a try, let us know! Leave a comment, rate it (once you’ve tried it), and take a picture and tag it @omnivorescookbook on Instagram! I’d love to see what you come up with.
Homemade Hoisin Sauce
Ingredients
- 1/4 cup light soy sauce
- 2 tablespoons natural peanut butter
- 1 tablespoon honey
- 2 teaspoons rice vinegar
- 2 teaspoons sesame oil
- 1 clove garlic , grated
- 1/8 teaspoon black pepper
- 1 teaspoon miso paste (OR 1/2 teaspoon spicy fermented bean paste, OR 1/2 teaspoon gochujang + 1/4 teaspoon five spice powder, OR 1 teaspoon Thai chili sauce + 1/4 teaspoon five spice powder)
Instructions
- Combine all ingredients in a bowl and mix well.
- Store hoisin sauce in an airtight jar in the fridge for up to a month.
Hello Maggie. This recipe looks amazing. Do you think I could use white Miso?
Yes I think that’s totally fine.
I’ve made this sauce again and again. It is so delicious! I’m vegan and allergic to soy; until you came along with this recipe I was really missing decent Asian food! I use coconut aminos or Ocean’s Halo No Soy sauce, chickpea miso, and either maple syrup or sugar and water in place of honey. Both are good! The maple adds a depth of flavor that the sugar doesn’t, but it’s great to know that I have options! I’ve even used this recipe as a component of Pad Thai; I never thought I’d get to enjoy that again! Thank you so much.
Very good and delicious. Was perfect for the recipe I needed
We have to double it, but we have 4 kids. This is a great sauce, I ended up having to make my own sesame seed oil as I didn’t have enough. But it was worth it. Very tasty.
I used minced garlic and chilli sauce and molasses in place of brown sugar. Turned out great. My husband enjoys it with canned salmon on top of his stir-fry.
THIS IS DELICIOUS! Way better than store bought, and without all the crappy ingredients, like corn syrup. I’ve thought about buying at the store a number of times but didn’t want the processed ingredients. I didn’t know it was so easy to make!
I love that this sauce is so versatile. This sounds so easy to make as well.
This was great thanks. Most shop bought hoisin contains gluten even the bean pastes, so this was very useful and super easy.
This Hoisan is delicious! Finding a gluten-free Hoisan sauce is almost impossible, including at the Oriental food markets. Was able to whip this up using ingredients that were already in the pantry/fridge and it’s spot on. I can now enjoy so many Chinese dishes utilizing this sauce. Thank you for giving us this recipe!
I loved this recipe so much
This recipe is far preferable to a store-bought Hoisin sauce. It’s quick to prepare and flexible, without compromising on flavour. Thanks!
Just incredible (no surprise there!)
Put off bottled hoisin when i saw the sugar content…this sauce is yummy and works in all the recipes i’ve tried. Will keep in mind other recipes may need sweetening if they depend on commercial hoisin
I make a lot of home made condiments. This one is a very nice balance between taste and ease of prep.
This was a perfect – no actually BETTER hoison sauce for my salad dressing! There was something in the store bought hoison sauce that I didn’t like. I bet it was the five spice powder. So I left it out of the recipe using just Thai spicy Chili sauce. I really like this recipe and will use it again and again! Thank you for all your hard work developing this recipe!
Wow! I did the version with gochujang and it was great!! Tastes great in my recipe that I normally use store bought hoisin. So happy to find this!!! Thanks!
I’ll never buy Hoisin again. So delicious. Felt so healthy. Thank you so much. I had all the ingredients in the cupboard which was so useful during lockdown.
I needed hoisin sauce for a recipe, but had none in stock. This recipe was easy, flexible, took very little time to make and it was really delicious. It saved my recipe, and probably improved the flavour of the meal 100%. Thank you so much.
Will never buy pre-made again!
Love this recipe. Thank you. I didn’t add peanut butter or miso paste but it worked well for my chicken lettuce wraps.