The story of Chicken katsu
The name katsu comes from katsuretsu, the Japanese pronunciation of the English word cutlet. The European cutlet reached Japan at the end of the 19th century, in the Meiji era, along with the Western-style cooking the Japanese call yoshoku. Tokyo cooks remade it from the ground up: they cut it thicker, fried it in plenty of oil instead of a little butter in a pan, coated it in panko, and sliced it into strips so it could be eaten with chopsticks, next to rice, miso soup and finely shredded raw cabbage.
The first version to take hold was made with pork, tonkatsu, and chicken katsu, beef katsu and fish katsu followed. Today katsu is everyday food in Japan: some restaurants serve nothing else, it is sold in bento boxes and convenience stores, and it turns up in curry, in sandwiches and on rice bowls. In the United States and Britain chicken katsu and katsu curry are fixtures on the menus of Japanese restaurants and lunch counters.
What makes Chicken katsu itself
Chicken katsu and the Israeli schnitzel are cousins from the same European cutlet, and the difference lives in the details. The Israeli schnitzel is thin, large and cut from real chicken breast, pounded to half a centimetre, coated in fine breadcrumbs, often with sesame, and fried in a pan. It is eaten whole, in a pita with hummus and salad, or next to mashed potatoes. Katsu is thicker, 1 to 1.5 cm, so it stays juicy under a coat of coarse panko that fries up light and craggy. It is fried in deeper oil at a steady 170 °C, sliced into strips, and served with raw cabbage, rice and a dark, sweet katsu sauce.
