Recipe corner: Tonkatsu “baoger”

Saturday night tends to be fakeaway night here. In recent weeks we have had homemade pizza, burgers and even D’s attempt at KFC. I will blog the latter in due course once we have got the recipe perfect.

This week, though, we decided to do a bit of fakeaway fusion by creating the Tonkatsu baoger. 

Tonkatsu is a Japanese dish which consists of a breaded pork fillet that is fried until crispy and drizzled with a ketchup based sauce. Bao buns, meanwhile, hail originally from China and are particularly popular in Taiwan. Bring the two together in a burger type fashion, add a dill pickle and put fries and slaw on the side and, lo and behold, you’ve insulted a minimum of two great cuisines. But you’ve made something yummy in the process.

I’ve written about making bao buns before - my original recipe is here (and by mine I mean David Chang’s). But Chang calls for skimmed milk powder and, alas, I had none. I only keep it in for the odd occasion when I make bao and last time I checked it had completely solidified so I got rid. As an alternative, I used this recipe from BBC Good Food and was pleased with the results. Maybe one day I’ll do a side by side taste test (although given that bao are a bloody faff, and I am fundamentally quite lazy, maybe not). Anyway, for the baoger, you want to follow the methodology but make the end product bigger: a baoger bun has the equivalent amount of dough to three normal sized bao buns. I won’t reproduce the recipe here, but I will remind you that if you intend to make these, allow plenty of time. You can make them in advance and revive them when you come to eat (instructions on my original post).

The sauce, incidentally, is Tim Anderson’s from his lovely book, Namban. I’ve reduced the quantity here but you might still have some leftover - it’s a strong flavour so you don’t want to use TOO much at once.

Ingredients

2 large bao buns (see above)

1/4 cucumber

3tbsp rice vinegar

3tsp caster sugar

100ml just-boiled water

Tsp salt

Tsp dill

2 pork loin steaks, visible fat removed 

50g flour

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 tsp garlic powder

1/4 tsp white pepper

Egg, lightly beaten

Panko breadcrumbs

Tbsp vegetable oil 

3 tbsp ketchup

1.5 tbsp Worcester sauce

Tsp mirin

Tsp soft brown sugar

Tsp tamarind paste

1/2 tsp soy sauce

1/2 tsp English mustard

Pinch of garlic powder

Pinch of white pepper

Tsp wasabi

Serves 2 

Prep begins early in the day. Trim the pork (if necessary) and, using a rolling pin or similar, bash the steaks out so that they are nice and thin. Exact thickness will be to your preference of course; ours were about 5 mm. The important thing is to have them as even as possible.

Season the flour with the garlic powder, salt and pepper. Toss the pork well in the flour, cover and chill. If you remember throughout the day, turn the pork steaks in the flour to make sure it absorbs as much as possible and that all sides are well coated.

Combine the sauce ingredients and set aside.

Reduce the cucumber to ribbons using a potato peeler, sprinkle well with salt and set in a colander or sieve over the sink. Prepare the pickling liquor: whisk the sugar into the vinegar until dissolved then pour over the just boiled water and season with salt and dill. Allow this to cool for around 10 mins before rinsing the cucumber, squeezing out any excess water and transferring it across to the water-vinegar combo. Set aside.

About an hour before cooking, remove the pork from the fridge to come up to room temperature. 

Just before cooking, take two flattish dishes. In one, lightly beat the egg with a little salt and pepper. In another, strew across half the Panko breadcrumbs. Dip the pork steaks in the egg then transfer to the breadcrumbs. Sprinkle the other half on top of the meat. Turn a couple of times to ensure that the steaks are well covered.  You could double dip (in the egg and then back in the breadcrumbs) if you're feeling particularly fancy.

Set a frying pan over a medium high heat, and get the oil nice and hot. Fry the pork steaks until cooked all the way through - depending on the thickness this will likely only take a couple of minutes on each side. While the meat is cooking, revive the bao buns and spread them liberally with the sauce on one side and the wasabi on the other.

Transfer the meat to the buns. Remove the cucumber from the vinegar and again squeeze out to get rid of any excess. Place on top of the pork, fold the bun over and devour.