Thickness of sauce is a personal preference so there is no "ideal". Put a spoonful of it in a small dish and stick it in the freezer for 10 mins. Then check the consistency. Takes practice but this works for me: take a stainless steel tablespoon of it out of the pot and blow on it a bit. As it separates out note how much watery liquid settles around the edges of the spoon. Check it again 10 mins later. Once no separation forms it is ready to jar. Dave

I don't marinate when I'm making chicken teriyaki. I simply bbq my (boneless)chicken, slice it, and then top it with a sauce, like we used to do at the Japanese restaurant where I worked. If you made it this way, you could please your son and serve yourself sauce on the side to dip in as you liked (or not.)It also gives any other guests the control over how much sauce they use, which is nice because everyone's taste for salt is different. At the restaurant, they simmered chicken bones in equal parts of sake and soy sauce, with sliced ginger (appx. 4 or 5 thin slices per cup of soy) and sugar to taste. Straining out the bones and ginger slices, they then thickened the sauce to a thin-gravy thickness with corn starch. The owners were from Yokohama, and their sauces tended to be a good deal sweeter than those of many other restaurants. For myself, I tend to water down the soy with some chicken stock as well, as the style of sauce I loved so when I worked there has become really too salty for me now. Teriyaki is a very forgiving sauce, because you can always add a bit more of this or that until you get the flavor the way you like it. Be sure and use a Japanese soy sauce, such as Kikkoman or Yamasa rather than Chinese, because the flavor is different. To make teriyaki sauce into a nice stir fry sauce, add a good amount of finely grated fresh ginger (appx. 1 T per cup of soy). Then stir fry your meats/vegetables/tofu, add the sauce and thicken with a little corn starch slurry. This dish is called Shogayaki (Shoga is ginger).

Teryaki keeps well in the refrigerator. I do something very similar but my method is diefferent. When I prepare the veggies, I keep them separate on a big stainless pizza pan I have. Then drain the chicken, saving the marinade, heat the wok, add the oil and when hot stir fry the chicken and when no longer pink, remove into a clean pie dish, wipe the wok, add a little wine...rice wine or sherry or just plain white wine, to the reserved marinade, add about 1 1/2 T cornstarch and stir. Then heat the wok, add the oil and begin to fry the veggies, I start with the broccoli and carrot buttons( I don't grate) and celery sliced on the diagonal as they take longest, then add the onions and the green peppers and soon after the peas. When all had browned a little, I add the cornstarch marinade stuff.....and toss to coat all and bring to a boil, put the lid on and cook for a minute. I am a little goosey about reusing a chicken marinade without cooking it well, so I often dump the marinade and get some fresh terayaki to mix with the wine and cornstarch. BUT...LOL...with my method you don't have that extra fry pan to wash !! Now I am hungry for a nice chicken ( or shrimp!) stir fry! Linda C

jenswrens, I've had a lid get stuck on a standard cooking pot, too. I think the evaporating steam condenses and somehow the water forms a seal around the lid....most of the time the pot has no problems, but once in awhile it seizes up and we end up jerking it back and forth until it release. Once we had to beat on it, and now the cover has dings in it. Very weird and frustrating since I really like the pot otherwise. I try not to let the lid set on it after I remove it from the heat now. I'll put another lid on it that isn't quite the right size if I want to keep it covered. Glad to hear your sauce was rescued with no pot damage.