“Just the smell of all these ingredients coming together: the ginger, the garlic, the green onion ... it brings me right back to those times.'
In 2019, founder and CEO of Bachan's Japanese barbecue sauce, Justin Gill , brought his family's multigenerational recipe to stores nationwide. His grandmother, Judy Yokoyama was the inspiration behind it all.In this recurring series, SFGATE food editor Steph Rodriguez sits down with Bay Area chefs and those with deep ties to the food industry at their favorite dives, cozy mom-and-pop spots and.
“Everything has been growing so fast. Our team went from myself, my wife — early on my bachan would come help — my kids, my mom and now we have a team of 15 full-time team members,” Gill says. “We’re working a lot and just trying to keep it going, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”Steph Rodriguez/SFGATE
as the setting for our interview. For Gill, Ramen Gaijin is a place he enjoys taking his family for a warm meal, made from ingredients inspired by local farms. It’s a restaurant where he says the food is always fresh, always reliable on a weeknight and a place where the owners, Matthew Williams and Moishe Hahn-Shuman, supported Bachan’s in its earliest stages.
With our meal off to a solid start, Gill opens the pack of Bachan sauces he brought and busts out the newest flavors to join the ranks: yuzu and hot-and-spicy. Adding more flavors to the Bachan’s line, along with a gluten-free version, is a sign of the company’s growing success, but Gill admits it wasn’t an easy road by any means.
Not willing to compromise on his values and the ingredients that made the sauce so popular with neighbors and friends, Gill discovered he could keep the integrity of the recipe if he cold-filled each bottle. It’s a process that doesn’t require a product to be heated to high temperatures. During pasteurization, Gill says some flavors can be lost or burned off before the product is even bottled, leading some companies to lean on artificial flavors that can withstand this method.