Knowledge Base > Dan Marek - Ask Me Anything (Office Half Hour)

Ask Me Anything (Office Half Hour)

Dan Marek - Ask Me Anything (Office Half Hour)

This event was on Tuesday, July 15, 2025 at 11:00 am Pacific, 2:00 pm Eastern

Join Chef Dan Marek in his virtual office as he welcomes all of your questions. This event was created for you and we encourage you to Ask Anything – from cooking techniques to cours… Read More.

Recorded

Question:

I am making Yaki Udon and cannot locally source some of the ingredients (wild mushrooms, Worcestershire sauce, amble oelek, sesame oil, and mirin) - any suggested substitutes?

— Peyton Kruk

Answer:

So I'm a little surprised you can't find some of these ingredients. Um, the mushrooms you can use any kind of mushrooms you want to, to be able to make udon. Um, the rest of these are basically for your sauce, right? So you don't have to use a wish ashire sauce, although I'd be shocked if you couldn't find a wish Ashire sauce and pretty much every grocery store Sabo leak is a hot sauce. You definitely don't need to use that one in particular. You can something, you can use something like a sriracha, which can be found in pretty much every grocery store. Um, Sesame Oil and Mirin. You can always find those basically, um, in your, the international aisles of the grocery store. But if not, try looking, um, for an Asian mart near you. Um, you know, there are a lot of them in different cities. They're typically a small kind of standalone grocery store. But Peyton, if you email us, um, at support@Rouxbe.com, we can always help find a place near you. Just tell us the city that you're living in and we usually do just a quick search to be able to find a place that we would know that would carry the products like that. But most of these things are pretty easy to be able to substitute out. Um, again, the mushrooms, you can use any kind of a mushroom. The eshi sauce should be able to find at any grocery store. It's gonna be kind of near like sauces, like ketchups and stuff like that, but hot sauce, you can use the hot sauce if you'd like. Sesame oil and mirin, those are two ingredients where it's a little hard to replicate because the mirin is basically like a sweet kind of a wine, but it's cooking. Um, and the oil, you could use a non sesame oil and you can actually toast some sesame seeds to be able to get the flavor out of those too. So you can definitely use something a little bit different from those. But I'll bet you if you did a little bit of a search in your town, um, or a Google search, you'd be able to find them pretty quickly.
Dan Marek

Dan Marek

Director of Plant-Based Culinary & Dev

rouxbe.com