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.

Recent Eats (a "Summer in Lockdown" edition)

Hello, hello, hello!  How is everyone?  Hopefully well, as we continue to be...although perpetually slightly tired, slightly grumpy, slightly fed-up.

Working from home has long ceased to be a novelty and now the days drift, inexorably, into each other with very little to distinguish between them.  The weather in Yorkshire has been rather grey for the past few weeks which rather exacerbates the monotony.  When we first went into lockdown, I found the sunshine to be irritating - as if the universe was mocking us with its glorious blue skies and golden warmth while the world went to shit.  Now, I miss it.  But I was ever contrary.

Although lockdown has begun to lift in earnest, we are staying put for the time being.  As long as we are able to work from home (and no return to the office is being mooted for a good few months) and can get all shopping delivered, it seems silly to take unnecessary risks, however much part of me longs to go and sit in a pub.  In common with many people, anxiety over the immediate threat of the virus has now been replaced by anxiety at venturing back out into the world.  In fact, that might end up being our biggest challenge.  But plenty of time to think about that later.  July, at least, will see very little change chez Seren.

Cooking continues to be my preferred form of distraction - well, cooking and reading, although my attention span hasn't been great so not all books are grabbing my attention.  My favourite discovery of the last few months has been the two Hawthorne books by Anthony Horowitz - if you enjoy classic police procedural novels then these are great, and they have a pleasingly (to this former literature student) meta twist - although D found it to be slightly annoying.  I'm quite sad that he hasn't written more, as I gulped them down. 

Anyway, food! Yes.  I uploaded a few photos to Google to prompt this post and, because I have long since ceased to have any shame about my complete lack of ability to make ANY food look decent in photography, I will share them here.

Possibly the prettiest dish of lockdown was this lovely dish adapted from a Diana Henry recipe - chicken baked with nectarines, honey and lavender.  I adore Diana Henry and own most of her books but if you don't, she has been making useful recipes available throughout lockdown on the Telegraph website where usually they lurk behind a paywall.  The original recipe is here - although obviously I'm not sure if this will remain freely available for ever.  This dish sounds like it will be too sweet and perfumed to be palatable but I found it to be incredibly well balanced.

Less pretty, but still a magnificent beast - this is the roast rolled pork belly that D cooked a few weeks ago for Sunday lunch.  I know that pork belly is not for everyone with it's unctuous layer of fat, but we really enjoyed this and LOOK at that gloriously crispy skin!  D has been using Farmison and Co every month to source our household meat.  It's not the cheapest but everything we have bought has been of excellent quality and we are sure to stretch things as far as possible.  Also worth noting that they experienced very little by way of delays or supply issues even in the height of lockdown.

Ah, and now back to pictures of beigey brown slop.  Delicious!  But, truly, we have a newfound respect for pulses as a household and a VERY well stocked dry food pantry now where we used to rely on tins.  The top picture shows an attempt at a sort of cross between egg and beans and shakshuka which was delicious but I just can't get the cooking of the eggs right when I do these sort of dishes on the hob, which is so annoying as I love shakshuka (try Ottolenghi's recipe if this is a new one on you).  I have consulted the internet and next time I make something like this I am going to transfer to the oven for the final cooking stage.  If I crack it (ooh, egg pun!) I'll report back.

And curry - pretty much every curry we have at the moment has some sort of dahl on the side.  This split pea dahl was from the blog archives - 2011, can you credit it?  But, actually, the star of this dinner was the humble looking flat bread you see acting as a baked parasol type thing.  This was a peshwari roti, the recipe taken from Meera Sodha's wonderful "Made in India".  I fear I have condemned myself to produce these every time we have curry in future.  But, like every other recipe we have tried from this book, it is relatively quick to do, simple and tasty.  Probably not a tome for people who are advanced practitioners in the art of spice, but as a source of speedy weeknight curries, excellent.  I'm eyeing up the rest of her oeuvre.

Finally, Saturday nights have been fakeaway nights recently,  Pictured here is D's first attempt at a homemade KFC (DFC???) which was delicious - I'll blog it once we've got it absolutely perfect.  There is also a recipe for a tonkatsu "baoger" to follow shortly - yes, another crappy pun and (according to Google) not even one that I am first to use (although I was so proud of myself when I thought of it that if I was capable of patting myself on the back I probably would have done).

Hope things remain safe (and delicious) with all out there in the ether!