How To Make Perfect Tonkatsu | Japanese Pork Cutlet | とんかつの作り方

when people visit Japan I think there are certain dishes that kind of capture people's imagination even if they don't like Japanese food I've never had Japanese food before they can have a sandwich on the bullet train or they can have a curry or even just a fried schnitzel like thing at a local shop and quite often people will come back from the holiday and go that was my favorite dish that I had in Japan of course I'm talking about Tom katsu tonkatsu is a Japanese pork cutlet Tom means is one pronunciation for pork in Japanese and kutsu is short for the word cutlet in Japanese so we're gonna go through over the next couple of weeks the regular tonkatsu the cuts ascender cuts cutting all of the different variations of Tom cuts ooh and I really think you can enjoy it we're starting with the regular old tonkatsu and that's a fried piece of pork in bread crumbs with a bit of cabbage and things on the side so there's a few different armistice of course the pork there's the the sides I guess the salad type of things and there's the sauce as well so before we get to I guess the main event let's get these other things out of the way first let's do our sides first so I've got a nice big cabbage here and this want to shred that really really finely now you can do this with a knife just really really finely shred it with a knife it's a little bit more difficult to do then if you use one of these this is a mandolin there in Japanese that the brand is bending up Ben Lee now is like a play on words it kind of means isn't it convenient and they certainly are convenient so I'm just very very fine and shred this cabbage I think that will probably do is it's really nice and fluffy and that's the texture we're going for you can just kind of serve it like this fresh but I think it's a little bit nicer if you just drop it into some cold water that does two things firstly it washes it not that it's all that dirty anyway but also it just kind of leeches out a little bit more of the business from the cabbage so you kind of get a sweeter result just soak this in water for about 10 minutes then I'll spin it dry and keep in the fridge until ready to use it tonkatsu is usually served with tonkatsu sauce and you can buy that easily from a shop this is the bulldog brand which is very very popular you see it's just vegetable and fruit sauce tonkatsu sauce so if you can get this you can just use that if not I'll show you a couple of different ways to do it next week's video will be kind of the full bells and whistles version the kind that you get in the high-end tonkotsu place where they're definitely definitely making the sauce themselves rather than just buying it off the shelf but for the purposes of today I'll show you kind of an Express version a way you can get this if you can't get this in your local grocers you can make it from ingredients that are pretty readily available starts with some tomato ketchup some Worcestershire sauce to about half a cup of tomato ketchup maybe a tablespoon or two of Worcestershire sauce some soy sauce and then this is Japanese karashi we could easily use hot English mustard as well about half a teaspoon of that okay there's a good mix so it's all mixed smoothly you gotta really try and work some of the mustard in there the Worcestershire sauce and this is really quite important because tonkatsu sauce is really based on a british style Worcestershire sauce so adding those kind of spicy fruity flavors it's how we get our express version of tonkatsu sauce but for now I'll put this aside and we'll get on to the main event now for the pork itself it may look a bit intimidating but with tonkatsu there are kind of two main types cutter there's hidden which is Japanese for Philip or Ross which is kind of Japanese for sirloin so this is your pork loin D skinned and debone so usually you've got bones that running on here I've asked my butcher to take those off for me and he's taken the skin off as well now you can easily ask the butcher to do that took him about three seconds after I asked him do that for me but you can also buy and say a pork chop and cut the bone out yourself a loin chop or even a pork loin roast and then just take the skin off that very easy to do but even easier if you ask you what you to do it I only cook both varieties just to show you kind of how they're different I want to cut some quite thick cutlets I guess you know that's the cuts the cuts with its so I want this let's say maybe two centimetres thick and with our fill it to about one and a half two centimeters thick I've just got a couple of rasool' loin cutlets here and about four here or fill it cupboards here and one step that I think is really really overlooked is tenderizing the meat firstly you want to salt this really well so before you your fryer anything at least 40 minutes in advance you really want to give the meat a good salt [Music] the salts gonna do a couple of things firstly it's in a seasoned meat obviously gonna make it a little bit saltier but it also acts like a dry brine so by salting this 40 minutes in advance or an hour in advance it's gonna draw some of the moisture out of the meat that's gonna dissolve the salt and that's gonna get then reabsorbed back into the meat so it's gonna give you a much juicier cutlet the second thing you want to do to tenderize is poke a lot of holes in it I prefer using one of these to I guess a tenderizing mallet you can use a tenderizing mallet that's totally fine but I want a nice thick cutlet and the more you pound with a tenderizing mallet the thinner it becomes you can also just use the back of a knife and give that a bunch of chops as well but it's the same thing as the tenderizing mallet the reason this is important is because Japanese cuisine really uses a knife and fork even for your sugar or westernized dishes like this so usually picking up a piece of cutlet with chopsticks and maybe getting a bite out of it you need your teeth to be able to go through that quite easily tear with your chopsticks like a kind of caveman so poking holes all through this now when you've poked all the holes another thing you want to do is actually just put a couple of cuts into this nice rich fat cap that's on top of it and that's to basically keep your cuts ooh flat when it comes to frying it because the meat will contract but the fat won't and so what happens then if the meat is contracting and a fat isn't when it's being cooked you end up with this kind of buckled tonkatsu is not what you want so just a few little cuts in the fat they will allow the fat to kind of open up and your tonkatsu will stay flat after it's fried so then you just want to push it kind of back into it's original cutlet shape so it hasn't flattened out too much which looks absolutely perfect and we'll put that away in the fridge for about half an hour so that's salt the kind of brine I'll do the same with these little Phillips as well I'll just put these in the fridge while I explain what we're doing over here so we're nearly ready to fryer tonkatsu tonkatsu is a breaded cutlet it's a schnitzel essentially so you need I guess three things to cover you cut it in some plain flour some eggs and breadcrumbs of course the breadcrumbs are really quite specific they're panko crumbs panko is a Japanese style of breadcrumb and it's a lot fluffier and lighter than your regular kind of toasted western-style breadcrumbs you can see how kind of big and fluffy these are and they're also very pale so punker boot crumbs are actually that they're not made by by grinding bread they're made by shredding bread and it's shredding cooked bread that hasn't been browned it's quite ingenious how it's made because loaves are baked usually and it gives them a brown outside and the white inside but to get punker bread crumbs actually rise the bread in its uncooked form by passing an electric current through it it's quite ingenious these are the ones that I like to use this is some at their more oisi pumpkin what that means is even after it's gone cold it will still be delicious this style of funko the reason I like this is because they're a little bit bigger in their flakes than the regular pumpkin just some regular old eggs so after about 45 minutes you'll see there's not a lot of salt left on the outside of the pork what's happened there is the liquid from the pork has come out dissolve the salt in it's been reabsorbed back in so firstly it's nice and juicy inside and secondly it's also seasoned all the way through and now it's time for our coating the most important thing when you're doing Japanese fried foods is that and this is gonna sound little bit weird consider fried foods or deep-fried foods as steamed foods when Japanese chefs are taught the art of deep-frying it's not just about getting the crispy outside the secret to good deep-frying is about controlling the inside that's steaming you know there's no direct contact of the oil onto this meat so in order to make sure that this meat is cooked correctly we've got to consider that to be a steamed food because oil doesn't make fried foods soggy what makes fried food soggy is the juicers from the thing that you're frying coming out and wetting these bread crumbs so if you're overcooking things in it's fried coating what's going to happen is the juices of the meat will come out and that's what's gonna make your tongue cut so soggy so for if you want it to be really really crispy you've got to consider this to be steaming inside and as it steams inside we want to take it out of our deep fryer at just the point before it starts to a release a lot of its liquid that's gonna give us a much juicier kutsu inside and also it's gonna keep air outside nice and crisp how do we do that it's not just flour egg breadcrumbs as you might for regular schnitzel because you're trying to encase this steamed food we're going to do this about two or three times flour egg flour egg may be flour egg again before we go in to our Tong cutter so we want to create like a nice package that's gonna hold our loin or our foods inside there so you've got this nice lovely coating that's protected from the juices inside when you are doing this kind of crumbing procedure it's best to go straight from the crumbs into our hot oil so I'm going to bring that up to temperature first to about 100 75 degrees when you're doing this breading procedure I see people doing it and getting their hands absolutely covered even the coder you may as well be deep-frying your fingers at that point there's a very easy solution to keeping it all completely clean and that is this just a skewer that's all you need to make sure that this process goes very very simply if you're using your hands you're actually gonna leave fingerprints all throughout your hands are gonna rub off some of that coating that you're trying to create particularly when it comes to the punko and so you'll find that you have kind of your four fingers plus thumbprint that goes into your tonkatsu but if you use just a simple little skewer and then you can use your hand to just toss a bit of the flour over the top shake it off make sure it's coated on the edges as well then into the egg and then back into the flour and egg again [Music] you start to see were building up a thicker coating the flower o- cannot protect not just our cutlet from the oil but also the bread crumbs from the cutlet itself in the egg when you move the cutlet from the front to the back that ensures your coating all the sides as well because you don't want just the top in the bottom you want those sides to be completely coated in egg to drop that into the punker that's ready flue oil because we've only touched dry ingredients our hands just about completely clean I'll do the same with these little Phillips as well unfortunately it's not that easy to give you an exact time that you need to cook your tongue cut so forth it's gonna vary by the thickness of the cutlets gonna vary between the Philip and the loin but the thing is though it does make it quite easy because you're never really gonna cook just one Cutler so put you cut it into the oil and start a timer but for the thickness I've got here around three minutes a side is gonna be really really good when the meat starts to release some of its liquid you can actually hear it you can hear the liquid the juices coming out into the oils gonna start to splutter and hiss a little bit and at that point you want to take the cutlet out so that means that you're starting to release a little bit of liquid if you cook it more than that you know release more of the juices inside and it get a soggy tonkatsu so listen for the amount of time it takes for that sort of spattering to start take it straight up then and then you know how long you're cooking the rest of colors for cuz they're all going to be the same size so I know my loin cutlets are taking around five minutes of frying to get to the point that I want when you take the tonkatsu out you want to stand it up sort of on an angle to drain you don't drain it flat because that's just gonna let the oil pull inside that package we've created if you're grading on an angle so it drains down to I guess the corner you're getting rid of as much oil as possible so you're gonna get a nice light tonkatsu rub them on that's tastes really oily in between cooking each cutlet make sure you're skimming away all of the breadcrumbs the breadcrumbs and what's left in the oil is what's gonna change the taste of the or you want to keep this oil as clean as possible so constantly skimming with one of these taking out all the rest of those breadcrumbs otherwise burn and foul your oil the Philips are gonna take a lot of this and actually you want to cook them a lot less as well you still want them to be a little bit pink on the inside so these I suspect are gonna take just about two to three minutes of each one of these tiny little Phillips now that looks absolutely fantastic I've cut some tomato and some lemon for our garnishes this is a bit of radish pickle called tuck one you can use any kind of Japanese pickle you like but I think it's good to have a few slices of pickle on there just as sort of a refresher when you are cutting into your tonkatsu of course our cabbage make a nice pile of that onto the plate first and this cabbage is a lovely texture when you put it together with this tonkatsu lovely and crisp so the way you want to cut this it's a little bit different you don't just want to go straight into it with a knife you actually want to break into this casing that we've made a little bit first so it's sort of softly into the casing first and then fast with it not to go all the way through and that looks wonderful inside I want to show you what this should look like inside you see when I squeeze it all the juice that comes out of the centre there that is exactly what you're after so this into our plates a little bit of pickle on the side here - some lemon and tomato I'm gonna put this tonkatsu sauce into a jug to serve on the side because you've got this lovely crispy tonkatsu you don't want to make it all wet with the sauce so you actually want to add the sauce a little bit at a time and the last thing I want to serve it with is just a little bit of Japanese mustard just smear it onto the side of the plate here you may look like a weird presentation but this is actually quite normal in Japanese cuisine quite honestly I can't imagine a better tasting or better-looking tonkatsu than this one right here [Music] [Music]

Channel: Adam Liaw

Views: 823,448

Keywords: Pork, cutlet, tonkatsu, tonkotsu, ramen, japanese food

Id: aASr5x0d3Ys

Length: 17min 2sec (1022 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 03 2019