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.
I’m excited to try this! I’m allergic to nightshades, and every bottled Hoisin sauce at my grocery has chili peppers as an ingredient, which are poison to me, even a scant amount. I can always add ground szechuan peppercorns, if I want hot, I don’t know why I didn’t think to look for a recipe before this. I’ll make it next weekend! We always have Chinese on Saturdays. Thank you!
I have just started in the food industry and love to study about. Thanks for the valuable information
Just like everyone said, wow, this versatile recipe makes great tasting hoisin sauce! I don’t eat peanut butter so I used sunflower butter. We also don’t have any of the spice suggestions so I just put a bit of hot kimchi sauce we had in the fridge. I don’t like hot spicy, so the tiny amount of kimchi sauce I used was perfect (bf put some of his extra hot sauce on the dish to accommodate my going lite on the hot spicy in the hoisin). I only needed a little hoisin for a shitake and asparagus recipe. Thank you for this tasty, handy easy hoisin recipe!
I have a question. If I use the miso paste or spicy fermented bean paste, do I not need the five spice powder? There is an open parenthesis right after miso paste (red, yellow, white?) but there is no closed parenthesis.
Sorry about that! I just added it back.
If using miso or spicy fermented bean paste, you don’t need the five spice.
Very easy and tasty, using simple ingredients
So tasty and so easy. I wanted to make your Char Siu BBQ Pork but didn’t have any Hoisin Sauce. I came back to your site knowing you’d have a recipe for it. Between your chili oil (which is so good I’m trying it on everything — even vanilla ice cream) and now the hoisin sauce I don’t think I’ll be buying any Chinese sauces any more! Thank you for making me a better cook.
Thank you so much for the recipe. My husband has a wheat allergy so the regular store bought hoisin sauce won’t do. Now I can make my own with tamari. 🙂
Thank you so much! Have to leave out some ingredients to comply with my acupuncturist’s recommendations – feeling very grateful to be in the driver’s seat thanks to you.
OMG! I was out of store-bought hoisin and found this make quickly so I could continue with my sauce. I didn’t have miso or gochujang, but I did have five spice powder and Thai chili paste. This was so delicious, I wanted to drink the sauce! I can still taste the sauce in my head hours after using it in my recipe, and I want to run to the kitchen to whip up more!
Delicious and easy to make. The store bought Hoisin had #40 color and all kinds of other things I didn’t want. Used this in a cashew chicken with the Thai red curry and was SO good.
Very nice post. I absolutely love this website. Stick with it!
This sauce was amazing, loved it!
Is it really safe to store for a month in the fridge? Since it uses garlic and oil, I’m worried about botulism. I made this and love the recipe, but I’m storing in the freezer just like I store my homemade gomadare and pesto just in case
Made it yesterday! OMG yummy.I used my homemade Chili Sauce with 5 spice powder I blended. So good! Served with Chicken and salad! Delicious!
How much does this recipe make?
It makes about 1/2 cup of sauce.
I loved the recipe. Is there a substitute for peanut butter?
I would use Chinese sesame paste (it’s similar to tahini, but it uses toasted sesame seeds instead so it has a richer flavor).
This is actually the best Hoisen sauce! I’m so happy I never have to buy it again. This is better than any store bought one. Thank you!
This worked so well w my duck
No problem with it going bad…I ended up using this sauce on everything! Delicious and easy..
I happen to have 甜面酱 in my pantry. Could I use that instead of, or in addition to peanut butter? Thanks!
That actually can replace the soy sauce and peanut butter. And you might need to slightly increase the honey because 甜面酱 is quite salty. You can also skip the last ingredient (miso paste etc) because 甜面酱 has a good amount of umami.