| From the Otakon website: Chicken Katsu: What you need: ½ Cup Oil for frying 1 Cup of Flour 1 Cup of Plain Panko Bread Crumbs Salt and Pepper 2 Eggs 4 Chicken Cutlets - boneless and skinless 2 Tablespoons of low salt soy sauce (optional) How to cook it: -Prepare 3 shallow dishes each with the panko bread crumbs, flour and eggs -Use a mallet (or anything slightly heavy and flat) to pound out chicken to a quarter of an inch in thickness -Add the 2 teaspoons of soy sauce to eggs. Mix well. (this step is optional) -Add a bit of salt and pepper to bread crumbs. Mix well. -Heat up frying pan and add enough oil to fill the pan by about one inch. Heat should be med high. -Take the chicken one at a time and coat it in this order: Flour, eggs, bread crumbs. Set aside. -When all chicken is coated, oil should be ready for frying. To check, take a drop of egg and drop it in the pan. If it sizzles up, it's ready for cooking. If it floats and sizzles a little, give oil a little more time to heat up. -Place no more then 2 cutlets in frying pan at a time. Cook for approx. 3-4 minutes on each side. -When done, place chicken on a plate with paper towel to drain oil. Serve right away. ----------- NOTES ***POUNDING MEAT*** *cue rimshot drumbeat* Anyway... no matter how you shape it, meat is meat. You think chicken nuggets are found like dangling around on the bird? (cue another rimshot drumbeat) Best bet for this dish is to get some boneless chicken thigh meat. It's less expensive than breast meat and usually is the perfect serving amount. The method I would use to prepare for the meat pounding... After setting up your cutting board, place a layer of plastic wrap over it, at least covering the surface of the board. Place 2-3 chicken thighs in the center of that wrap, then place another sheet of plastic wrap. Also, wrap your mallet in plastic wrap as well (it helps keep contamination to a minimum. Chicken is some harmful stuff when it's not cleaned off your tools. Look to previous posts about Salmonnela.) Instead of pounding directly down into the meat (that will cause you to break the meat fibers and poke a hole into your cut) pound in an outward direction starting from the edges going inward. This gives you the ability to shape your chicken cut into a nice long shape. Try not to shape the meat off the edge of your cutting board. Make sure it's even so everything cooks evenly. If you wanted to, you can pound the chicken flat as rolled dough and cover your entire cutting board. If you actually do want to though, you can use a rolling pin to finish after you pounded the meat enough. After pounding the meat, pick it up with the edges of the lower plastic wrap sheet to your cooking station, with your prepared ingredients (or Mise en Place) and repeat or any other pieces you want to prepare. ***EGG WASH*** Pretty sure I went over this awhile back, but it serves a little different purpose in cooking. Egg wash for frying serves as a sticky coating for your breading, kinda like the batter used for the Colonel's Original. Pretty much, that's not exactly chicken skin you bite into when you have a 12 piece bucket, it's the fried batter. Minus all the flour, milk, etc in that batter, you got eggs. You can always use an egg substitute to cut down on cholesterol, but I still thnk you may as well use an egg. In a sick twisted way, it's sort of ironic for the chicken... mwahahahaha.... The flour combined with the egg makes a sort of paste for the panko. It's most effective doing it in the flour/eggwash/panko order, since eggwash/flour wouldn't really supply a wet sticky surface on the chicken, and any other combination would wash the panko off the chicken. ***DONENESS*** What I like about chicken is that overcooking it a little won't deter the tenderness. Well to an extent anyway. You overcook anything and it can be tough as leather. With chicken though, there's more of a time forgivingness, unlike fish or beef. Fish is more of a precise time while steak is done by specific levels. Chicken is cooked chicken, then still cooked chicken. Then further would be chicken chewtoys. But one thing is for sure though: Make sure your chicken isn't UNDERdone, that's not a good thing. Safe cooking temperature for a chicken is 165F. ***PLATING*** Have some shredded cabbage on hand. Sprinkle over a medium sized plate. After cooking, place your chicken on a cutting board lengthwise. Using a serrated knife, cut into strips 1/2 to 3/4 inches by width. WITHOUT mixing them out of their order, place your chicken on the bed of cabbage you spead on the plate, just above the center. If you used a square plate, make sure it is at an angle so it makes a diamond, not a square. Either place two dipping cups of BBQ sauce and Honey Mustard near the bottom corner, or clear the cabbage of the same area on your plate and pour side by side. Also if you have a refillable condiments squeeze bottle, squeeze your sauce over the chicken in a zigzag fashion going across your cuts. Make it look nice though.  ***VARIATIONS*** It's pretty much a chicken sandwich patty. You can do some Katsu-Sando with some bread and mayo. Or however you want to do it... Cut in the same fashion into rectangles 3/4 inch in diameter and get rid of the crust. My thoughts on this recipe is just that it's straightforward. Trying it out at my last job in a kitchen, it's pretty much to the T. But if you want to go daring and go big, try it a tempura batter syle. Make a lumpy tempura batter (not much, like 2 cups worth or less) and use that instead of eggwash. Your finished product will be big in volume, have a nice color, and will probably fill you up faster. As in difficulty, this one is probably a 4 or 6 out of a 10. The preperation hammering the meat is a little precise, but afterwards everything is simple enough. |
RamenSoup43Aug 19, 2012 10:14 PM
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