The Ultimate Crispy Chicken Katsu from Sudachi Recipes
Mmm, crispity cronchity chicken cutlets
[Go straight to the recipe: The Ultimate Crispy Chicken Katsu from Sudachi Recipes]
Hello, tens of readers! It's been a while. What have I been up to since…[inserts heavy groan of failure] February? Not too much. The biggest change is that my daughter has morphed into a much larger, smarter toddler whose favorite word "bæsj" (that's "poop" in Norwegian, and yes, I am very proud). I’m pretty much the same as I was before: eczema-laden and somewhat lazy, so lazy that I haven't even finished watching Squid Game yet.
But since I must continuously stuff food into my body to make it function, I've been continuously trying new recipes. And I've been disappointed by most of them. Hahahaha ugh, cooking sucks. But you know what doesn't suck? This recipe!
In the past when I've made chicken katsu, I've always done the standard steps of dredge in flour + dip in beaten egg + coat in panko. But in this chicken katsu recipe, Yuto Omura of Japanese recipe blog Sudachi Recipes makes one easy change: instead of dipping the chicken in beaten egg, he dips it in a simple batter of egg, flour, and water. The result is chicken katsu with more panko and a thicker crust, and thus DELUXE CRISPITY CRONCHITY.
If you're not a fan of deep-frying, I don't blame you. Why pour a kiddie pool’s-worth of oil into a pot and risk starting a grease fire if you can just go to a restaurant whose cooks will bathe in oil fumes on your behalf? Maybe because you, like me, live in the katsu-void of Bergen, Norway. And thus, I bathe.
I've been on a bit of a deep-frying kick lately thanks to being too lazy to clean out a pot of oil. In the before times, I'd use a pot of oil once or twice before funneling the oil back in a jug for future use. In recent times, I've left the oil in the pot and cooked with it a buuunch of times, straining out fried detritus after each use and adding a bit of fresh oil before heating it up again, until I think the oil has mutated into inedible goo. Is this gross? If denatured fryer oil can lead to cancer, how much cancer are we talking about? (If you know the answer to that question, don’t tell me.)
Another thing that has made deep frying easier besides "the pot of oil is already there, I may as well make some sweet sweet cronchies" is that I got this laser thermometer solely to monitor the temperature of the oil instead of using a pen thermometer. Was it worth spending US$60 just to take the temp of oil? Yups.
Notes:
I halve the recipe to scale it down for two adults and a toddler. This is a restrained amount for the three of us, but I'd rather feel satisfied after cleaning off my plate than think, "Dear god I ate too much chicken," which is definitely what would happen if I didn't halve the recipe. I use about 250 grams chicken breast, usually one huge-ass chicken breast divided into three pieces: two halves of a butterflied breast + one tender. I pound the chicken with the back of my knife to flatten any super thick parts and even out the thickness.
I usually just serve katsu with sides of rice and veggies, but in the pictures above, I served it as katsu curry to use up leftover pork curry. My go-to pork curry recipe these days is this one from Ivan Orkin, where he braises the pork in the oven and uses some of the braised pork liquid in the curry. Instead of roasting a five-pound pork shoulder, I roast four deboned pork neck chops, about two pounds, and use it all in the recipe.
I have yet to make Yuto's katsu sauce recipe since I'm still working my way through a bottle of homemade katsu sauce that’s been sitting in my fridge for months (this is probably longer than you're supposed to store it, but it tastes fine/it hasn't killed me). If you love katsu as much as I do, I recommend making a large batch of katsu sauce instead of making just enough for each meal.
Hope you like the chicken katsu recipe! If you make it, let me know how it goes!