Chicken Katsu Curry

What to expect

Taste

The sauce is savoury-sweet and much gentler than the word curry implies: onion and carrot cooked down give it most of its sweetness, the apple adds more with an acidic edge, the soy gives salt and depth, and the spice sits low and warm with almost no heat. The roux contributes a distinct toasted-flour flavour that is the closest thing in it to a signature. Against that, the cutlet is plain — salt, pepper, fried crumb and chicken — and the plainness is the point, because it is a texture on a plate of soft things.

Aroma

Toasted flour and curry powder from the roux, which is the strongest smell in the whole process and fills a kitchen within about a minute of the spices hitting the fat. Later, hot oil and frying breadcrumb, which is a sweeter and more biscuity smell than deep frying usually gives.

Texture

The whole dish is a texture argument. Panko gives a crust that shatters into distinct shards rather than crumbling, and under it the beaten breast is soft and fine-grained. The sauce is smooth, thick and clinging, and the rice is sticky. There is nothing crunchy in the bowl except the crust, which is why protecting it matters more here than in almost any other dish.

Sound

The crust cracking under the knife when the cutlet is sliced, which is the single most useful cue that the frying went right. Before that, the steady even bubbling of the oil, which should stay steady: a surge means the temperature was too high and a slowing means it has dropped.

How the flavour moves

Crunch and salt first, then the plain clean flavour of the chicken, then the sauce arrives underneath and stays, sweet then savoury then faintly warm. It finishes long and mild rather than sharp, and nothing in it spikes. That evenness is why it is comfort food and why a squeeze of something sour or a pile of pickles alongside earns its place.

Serve it

Hot sauce, hot cutlet, hot rice. The cutlet has a five-minute window from the rack to the table before the residual steam inside it starts softening the crust from underneath, which is also why it rests on a rack rather than on paper.

Goes with

Short-grain rice, shredded raw white cabbage, and Japanese pickles. A sharp fruity sauce on the cabbage. Cold beer or green tea.

Cook's notes

Difficulty

Moderate. The roux and the frying both want attention, and neither is difficult once.

Cost

Cheap to mid. Two chicken breasts, an onion, a carrot and a bag of panko.

Equipment

A deep frying pan, a rolling pin, three shallow trays for the crumbing, a wire rack and a probe thermometer.

When to make it

A weeknight with an hour, or a weekend where the sauce is made in advance.

Best season

None.

You know it is done when

The roux should be the colour of peanut butter and smell toasted. The cutlets should be an even deep gold with no pale patches, and the crumb should stand up off the surface in visible shards.

And it feels like

The crust should crack under a knife rather than compress. The sauce should hold a line drawn through it with a spoon.

Food safety

74C/165F in the centre of the cutlet. The crust reads much hotter than the meat, so probe from the side.

Where it goes wrong

• Frying a whole breast without flattening it, so the thin end is dry and the thick end undercooked.
• Taking the roux past peanut butter to dark brown, which is bitter and unfixable.
• Adding all the stock at once and getting lumps.
• Frying four cutlets in one pan, which drops the oil temperature and gives greasy crumb.
• Draining on kitchen paper, which steams the underside soft.
• Pouring the sauce over the crumb.

If it does go wrong

Crumb falling off in the oil: it was not pressed on, or the cutlet went into the egg still floury-wet. Pale greasy crust: the oil was below temperature or the pan was crowded. Sauce lumpy: the stock went in too fast; a stick blender will rescue it. Sauce tastes floury: it needed the full twenty minutes of simmering. Sauce bitter: the roux went too far.

Making it ahead

The sauce is better made a day ahead. The cutlets are not.

Keeping it

The sauce keeps five days and freezes. The cutlets keep a day and are never as good again.

Reheating

Cutlets on a rack at 200C/400F for 6 to 8 minutes. Sauce in a pan with a splash of water.

Freezing

The sauce freezes for three months. Crumbed raw cutlets freeze well and can be fried from frozen at a slightly lower temperature for longer.

Leftovers

Sliced cold katsu in a sandwich with shredded cabbage is a real dish in Japan and better than reheating.

Scaling it

The sauce scales freely. The frying does not, and eight cutlets means four batches and a rack in a low oven.

Substitutions

Japanese curry powder if you can get it, otherwise a mild supermarket curry powder with the garam masala added, which is what the recipe assumes. Chicken thigh works and is more forgiving, though it does not give the flat even cutlet the dish is built around. Vegetable stock makes it vegetarian-adjacent, but the cutlet does not.

Dietary swaps

Contains cereals containing gluten, egg, soya and milk. Not straightforwardly adaptable: the crumb, the roux and the soy are all wheat.

Shopping for it

Japanese curry powder and panko from an Asian grocer. Everything else is a supermarket shop.

Keeping the cost down

Panko in a large bag from an Asian grocer costs a fraction of the supermarket price and keeps for months.

Nutrition

Shallow-fried and roux-thickened, so it is substantial. The cutlet absorbs relatively little oil if the temperature is held.

Worth it?

The roux is the recipe. Everything else is assembly.

Where it comes from

Origin

Japan.

Also called

Katsu kare. The cutlet is katsu, from katsuretsu, and kare is curry.

Said out loud

KAT-soo KA-ray.

What the name means

Katsu is a shortening of katsuretsu, a Japanese rendering of the English word cutlet. It means the fried breaded cutlet and nothing else. In British usage katsu has drifted to mean the curry sauce, so that supermarkets sell katsu sauce and katsu curry made with no cutlet at all, which is a straightforward mistranslation that has become common enough to be worth naming.

History

Curry reached Japan in the Meiji era through Britain rather than directly from South Asia, arriving as a Western dish: curry powder in a flour-and-butter roux, thickened, sweetened and served with rice. It was adopted by the navy and then by the country at large, and Japanese curry is now sold as blocks of solid roux in every supermarket in Japan and eaten constantly at home. Tonkatsu, the breaded pork cutlet, came out of the same period of Western culinary influence and became a Japanese dish in its own right. Katsu curry combines them. Chicken katsu is a later variation on the pork original.

Why it matters

Japanese curry is close to a national comfort food, associated with school lunches, home cooking and cheap chain restaurants rather than with fine dining.

When it is eaten

Everyday. It is the definition of an ordinary weeknight dinner in Japan.

The traditional way

The roux. A Japanese curry is thickened by a cooked flour-and-fat roux in the French manner rather than by reduction, spice paste or nut paste, and that single fact explains why it tastes unlike any South Asian curry.

How it changed

In Japan the roux is now almost universally bought as a block rather than made. Outside Japan, katsu curry became a British high-street staple through Japanese restaurant chains and supermarket sauce pots from the 1990s onwards, which is also where the name drifted.

Regional variations

Countless within Japan, by sweetness, heat and thickness. Regional versions swap the cutlet for prawn, beef or croquettes.

How this version differs

The roux is made from scratch rather than from a block, which is the main difference from how this is cooked in most Japanese homes, and it is why the sauce here tastes less uniform and more toasted.

Sources and credit

None to an individual.

Related recipes

Categories

Cuisines

Japanese

Courses & dish types

CurriesMain coursesDinner

Main ingredients

Chicken