Tonkatsu

Had a very nice Tonkatsu meal when I was in Hong Kong. I thought, "Can I make pork chops like this?"  Just so happened that CitySuper had free recipes for customers to promote their products, and they had pork chop cutlets recipe available too.  I wouldn't recommend people to pick up all free recipes from there because some don't show all basic ingredients.  For example, they have "cream puff mix", or "pound cake mix", not much help for me.  However, since they are only promoting the dipping sauce in their cutlet recipe, I can follow the instructions to handle the pork chops.

One special trick it listed was to use low gluten flour (cake flour) to cover the meat before dipping it in egg and then panko (Japanese bread crumbs).  It didn't explain why but I did it and the batter was very fluffy and crunchy.  I didn't completely follow the marinade ingredients.  I kind of combined what I learned from different people to mix the seasoning together.  It's a success!

Ingredients:

4 - 6 fast fry pork loin centre cut (Fast fry is thinner slices so it will be cooked before the the batter is burnt)

1 tbsp mirin

1/2 tsp vinegar (this will tenderize the pork)

1/2 tsp sugar (just to cover up the sour taste from vinegar)

salt and pepper

one egg, beaten

low gluten flour (I sifted it first to get rid of the lumps)

panko (Japanese bread crumbs)

vegetable oil

sesame oil

lettuce, tomatoes, lemon for sides

Katsu sauce from Kikkoman

Method:

1 Cut small incisions into the surface o the pork particularly in the muscle and fat areas.  Doing this will prevent the pork cutlets from shrinking in size when it's heated. You can cut them into 3" size if each slice is too big.

2 Hit the pork with back of knife to tenderize the meat.  Marinade the pork for at least 1 hour.

3 Prepar flour, beaten egg, and panko.  Coat the pork with flour and shake off the excess.

4 Dip the pork into the beaten egg.

5 Put bread crumbs all over the pork.  Secure bread crumbs by patting.

6 Here's one trick from TV:  Heat vegetable oil and a few drops of sesame oil in it.

7 Slide pork cutlets into hot oil. (Original recipe says 170C, but I don't have a cooking thermometer.  I just saw the oil "moved" around in the pot quickly and I put in the meat and turned down the heat to medium to medium high.)

8 Since it's fast fry pork loin, as soon as you see the batter turned light goldenbrown colour, you can remove the pork to a stand to drain off the excess grease. Otherwise the meat will be too dry.

9 Cut them up in long slices.  Garnish with shredded lettuce, lemon wedges, and tomatoes slices.

I think it doesn't need much Katsu sauce.  The flavour is good by itself.  Adrian experimented different dipping ways and told me that one light dip on each end of the slice would be perfect.

Yum!