Everything I thought I knew about tonkatsu was buried in a milk bread
sandwich with shredded cabbage and sauce. Excuse the reference, but it appeared to me to be the Chick-fil-A of Japan. (Please hold the outraged emails.) But what did I know?

Evidently, very little. During a recent trip to Japan, I visited with Masato Ishizuki, a longtime Tokyo chef who’s opening up a place called Pebbly, which appears to be a Japanese-California mashup. Walking into his home kitchen, I was completely taken aback. First off, there were lots of different cuts of pork—not just a tenderloin or loin chop—and all of the pieces were quite thick, nothing like the relatively thin fillets one would use in a sandwich. And, of course, I discovered that this was not a sandwich at all—the breaded, fried pork is served with a sauce and maybe a salad on the side but not in the middle of a sandwich. (The sandwich concept, according to Masato, was designed to be consumed by geishas—small squares of food—so they would not mess with their
makeup. Sandwiches were also sold at train stations.) The other issue is
that this pork was from an heirloom breed and ribboned with fat, not at all what one would find in an American supermarket.

The first stumbling block, however, was the breadcrumbs, which are made from fresh shokupan, milk bread, and are quite different
from dried panko. (Any firm white bread will do; avoid cheap squishy
bread, however.) We searched online and found recipes that called
for freezing the bread briefly before grating or using a food processor.
Although this technique was far from perfect, two modifications
made it work. First, remove the crusts—that helped the final texture.
Second, freezing the bread for 45 minutes was insufficient; we
needed a full 3 hours or overnight. The final step was to use the standard blade, not the grating attachment, and now we had just what we wanted, more flakes than crumbs.

Now we had to deal with American pork, a far cry from the higher-fat,
heirloom-quality pork that Masato had in his kitchen. The obvious answer was to sprinkle the pork (tenderloin sliced into quarters
or 5-ounce boneless pork loin chops) with salt on a rack and let sit in the
fridge for at least 3 hours. (Larger chops did not fare well when fried—
they sank to the bottom of the pan and needed to be finished in the
oven.) Masato spritzed the pork with sake before breading—we tested
this and found that it did not make a noticeable difference. If you do
want to turn this into a sandwich, use a thinner cut of meat instead of
the thicker cuts called for here.

The coating was standard operating procedure: flour, then egg, then
breadcrumbs. We used slightly lower heat—325°F—and maintained an
oil temperature at 300°F to 325°F throughout. The pork cooked in
batches, about eight minutes each. The good news is that our homemade breadcrumbs browned more slowly than store-bought, giving the pork sufficient time to cook through.

The tonkatsu sauce is ketchup, Worcestershire, oyster sauce, unseasoned rice vinegar and granulated garlic. In Japan, Masato served his tonkatsu with a green salad with veggies and a yuzu-shio vinaigrette
instead of the usual shredded cabbage. Any side salad will do, but it
is a nice accompaniment to the fried pork.

In terms of which cut to use, we preferred the tenderloin since,
oddly enough, it came out juicier. Do not cook it beyond 140°F since
it will dry out. We fry the pork in two batches and put the cooked
pork on a rack on a sheet pan while finishing the remaining pieces.
Masato also said that the breaded uncooked pork can sit in the fridge
for up to 2 hours which is great for make-ahead.

One interesting side note. Masato explained that to write in Japanese
you need to know three systems: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. The
first has 46 basic characters and is often used for native Japanese
words; the second also consists of 46 characters and is used for foreign
and technical terms, and, finally, kanji which is Chinese characters
adapted into Japanese and consists of some 5,000 characters.
No question that cooking is a whole lot easier than writing in Japanese!

Chris Kimball

Christopher Kimball is founder of Milk Street, which produces Milk Street Magazine, Milk Street Television on PBS, and the weekly public radio show Milk Street Radio. He founded Cook’s Magazine in 1980 and was host and executive producer of America’s Test Kitchen until 2016. Kimball is the author of several books, including "The Yellow Farmhouse" and "Fannie’s Last Supper."