Katsudon

Variations

• Oyakodon: Chicken instead of pork cutlet.
• Sauce katsudon: No egg — the cutlet dipped in Worcestershire sauce (Fukui/Nagano style).
• Cheese katsudon: Add cheese to the egg.
• Ebi katsudon: Made with a fried shrimp cutlet.

Tips

• This is the dish that deliberately soaks a crust built not to soak. Tonkatsu presses its panko on firmly for a thick crunchy shell, and that page ranks crumb coarseness against its neighbours while doing it — gyukatsu on fresh panko, kushikatsu crushing its crumbs fine on purpose, tonkatsu at the coarse end. Chicken Kyiv goes further and says the crust there has to work as a container. Katsudon takes that same shell and pours dashi over it. So the four tips below are not five separate pieces of advice — they are all controls on how much of it gets wet.
• Keeping the broth shallow is the control. A shallow broth submerges the underside only, and the top of the crust never leaves the air. Reduce it hard and you lose both the volume that keeps that line where it is and the mildness — which is the point gyudon makes about the same family of broth, that the dashi is there to buy volume without concentration, since a donburi's liquid has to wet a whole bowl of unseasoned rice.
• Frying the cutlet ahead is about time, not convenience. Straight out of the oil a cutlet is hot and still holding fat, and dropped into broth it wets from both directions at once. Fried in advance, drained and cooled, it goes in last, so the crust's contact with the liquid lasts only the one or two minutes the egg needs.
• Cutting it into 2-3cm strips is the same arithmetic. Left whole it presents a wide face to the liquid and gives chopsticks nothing to work with. Sliced and laid down, the cut faces sit upward above the broth, and the whole thing becomes one piece that can be slid onto rice.
• Sauce katsudon is the control. The Fukui and Nagano version below uses no egg and no broth: the cutlet is dipped and set on the rice. Same cutlet, same rice, and it has simply decided not to wet the crust. What separates the two dishes is not an ingredient but that one question.
• Make them one at a time in a small pan for the neatest shape.
• Softly set egg is everything — add it near the end and barely cook it.
• Keep the broth shallow and don't reduce it too far, so it stays moist.
• Fry the cutlet ahead and add it at the end to keep things easy.
• Adding the egg in two stages keeps it layered and silky.