Fakeaway – Crispy Chicken Katsu with Rice


I know, I know, you’ve seen these bowls and that boiled rice a lot lately but we’re on a roll with our Asian recipes and today we travel to Japan with this fantastic chicken katsu with rice. The essence of comfort food, we love chicken in all its forms but when it’s fried, it delivers that extra kick. When paired with this tangy, sweet sauce, well, it’s just unbeatable.

We made this recipe a few times now but we can’t seem to ever get tired of it. This last time we made this chicken katsu (when we actually wrote down the steps before forgetting, I mean), it was for one of our close friends that is going to move out of the city. We were very keen on preparing something that was nice, but not too overly complicated. At the end of the day, the focus was our night, not much the food. This was the perfect balance: easy to make and doesn’t require too much attention, which means you can easily talk with your guests while you prep, but still impress them with a takeaway- and restaurant-level dinner at a fraction of the cost.

You’re welcome.

a white and blue decorated bowl with a bed of rice, a fried chicken breast coated in breadcrumbs, topped with a Katsu sauce set on a wooden cutting board and with two decorated chopsticks on top

Chicken Katsu with Rice

An easy to make, Japanese take on fried chicken with its typical, sweet but tangy sauce to accompany.
Prep Time 20 minutes
Cook Time 25 minutes
Total Time 45 minutes
Course Main Course
Cuisine Asian, Japanese
Servings 4 servings

Equipment

  • Wok

Ingredients
  

For the Sauce

  • 3 tbsp ketchup
  • 4 tbsp Worchestershire sauce
  • 2 tbsp light soy sauce
  • 2 tbsp mirin
  • 2 tbsp brown sugar
  • 1 tsp Dijon mustard

For the rice

  • 2 cups basmati rice (or another long grain rice)
  • 3 cups water

For the chicken

  • 500 gr chicken breast
  • 2 cups plain flour
  • 2 medium eggs (whisked)
  • 2 cups breadcrumbs (ideally panko, but any will do)
  • Salt
  • Pepper
  • 2 to 3 cups vegetable oil

Instructions
 

For the Sauce

  • This couldn't be easier: just add the ketchup, the Worchestershire sauce, soy sauce, mirin, sugar, and Dijon mustard togheter in a small bowl and whisk until the sugar is dissolved. Set aside.

For the Rice

  • Rinse the rice until the water runs clear (this might take 7 to 10 rinses).
  • Add to a pot with the water. Bring to a boil over high heat. Once boiling, take heat down to a minimum, cover, and let it cook for 12 to 15 minutes.
  • Once cooked, turn the heat off, fluff the rice, and cover to let it steam for 10 minutes.

For the Chicken

  • If you have big chicken breasts, slice them in half lenghtwise. You don't want thick slices for this. Pound them a bit to make them even so that they're going to cook perfectly.
  • Assemble your station: you need a bowl with the plain flour, one with the beaten eggs, and one with the breadcrumbs.
  • Cover each breast in flour and then eggs. Finally, make sure it's fully coated in breadcrumbs. Salt and pepper to taste.
  • Heat up the vegetable oil over high heat in your wok or pan. Test if the oil is hot enough by either dropping a couple of breadcrumbs in or using chopsticks: the bubbles should stick to the chopsticks.
  • Add the coated chicken, either one of two slices at the time depending on how big they are, you don't want to overcrowd the wok/pan. Cook for 6 to 10 minutes or until fully golden. Take out and absorb the extra oil with some paper towels.
  • TIP: if you have more than 4 pieces to fry up, turn your oven on at 80°C/175°F and let the cooked chicken rest in there to keep it warm while you fry the rest.

SERVE!

  • Now that the rice is fully steamed, add a layer of it on a bowl. Slice your fried chicken and lay it on the rice, and cover with the sauce. And buon appetito!
Keyword Fried chicken

Chicken Katsu: not your standard fried chicken

It goes without saying that the secret of this chicken katsu recipe is all in the sauce. This is a simplified version, as we didn’t want this to turn into a curry, and does not require cooking. However, if you actually want a proper curry, we would suggest giving a try to Tim Anderson’s recipe that you can find here. In case you don’t know him, Tim Anderson went from Masterchef contestant and winner to restaurant owner (Nanban is dangerously close to home and it’s beyond me how I haven’t been there just yet) to cookbook author (on that note, his ‘Japaneasy’ is one of my favourite cookbooks to look at, worth buying if you ask me).

Back to the katsu sauce, Tim Anderson’s recipe is a tad bit more complicated than ours while being quite simple, and it’s meant for a curry rather than just a katsu sauce, so you do your math. We tried to keep it as simple as possible because a. it was a Tuesday night b. we didn’t want a curry. Point is you can really experiment with this so don’t feel like you have to stick to a specific recipe. If you go and have a look around at the recipes for katsu sauce online, you’ll barely find two of the same.

white and blue decorated ramen bowl with boiled rice, a slice of deep fried chicken katsu topped with katsu sauce and two decorated chopsticks laying on top

Not another paragraph about Asian ingredients: the chicken katsu edition

If you’re SALT&CHILL regulars, you’ll know that now is the time when I start talking about where to get Asian ingredients and I recommend you to do that. We’ve done this for our teriyaki chicken, for our Korean ram-don noodles, for our Chinese sticky lemon chicken and we’ll probably keep doing it for all of our coming Asian-inspired recipes.

For this chicken katsu sauce recipe of course, the ingredients are pretty easy to find. Chicke katsu, funnily enough, is one of the most Western Japanese recipes (when I saw ketchup as main ingredient, I thought I accidently googled the wrong recipe). However, if you want to explore Asian cooking outside of katsu sauce, a trip to the Asian grocery store is well called for.

The reason why I love to stress this every single time is that those are not ingredients that you can easily substitute. It’s worth going to the Asian grocery store, spend £30 to £40 in stuff you’re going to be using a lot if you want to explore the marvellous world of Asian cooking and that have quite a long shelf life anyway. We have quite the selection at home, but this doesn’t mean that every time I go on TikTok and come across Chinese, Japanese, or Korean recipes, I don’t end up adding ingredients to my list (last of which is gochujang paste, a hot pepper paste used mainly in Korean food).

Back to business, we have a few recommendations for where to get your ingredients:

  • Asian Grocery UK – if you want to shop online. The selection is impressive and you can get lost in browsing, so start with a list fo essentials before you forget to buy dark soy sauce.
  • Longdan – online, but we’d recommend to go to one of their London shops because oh boy we spent easily one hour in there just browsing and learning and buying. Unrelated but if you like to bake, they also have essential flavouring like lemon, almond, and orange blossoms at a way cheaper price than your local supermarket.

In terms of must-haves to start, we’d advise buying at least:

  • Soy sauce, both light and dark: we only recently found out about dark soy sauce and let me tell you, it does make a massive difference. While they are very similar, dark soy sauce brings a whole other level of depth in flavour. Sure, you can stick to light soy sauce, but you’re missing out.
  • Mirin: a Japanese staple, this rice wine is very similar to sake. It’s sweet, and occasionally substituted by apple cider vinegar.
  • Shaoxing wine: a staple of Chinese cooking, this is the equivalent of the Western dry sherry. Another type of rice wine, we ended up using it for most things. Even non-Asian dishes.
  • Fish sauce: at first I was a bit skeptic about fish sauce. Let me tell you, it doesn’t smell particularly nice by itself, and I’m no fan of seafood. However, when added to sauces, ramen, soups and so forth, it does make the difference. You know that pungent flavour you get when you go and eat at a restaurant and you can’t figure out how to recreate? Well, it might be fish sauce.
  • Oyster sauce: similar to the above, it brings that extra bit of flavour and adds a bit of sweetness. Extremely common in Chinese cuisine, but used pretty much everywhere. I find that we don’t use oyster sauce as much as fish sauce, so if you want to pick just one of the two, go with the fish sauce.

The list could be potentially endless but this is a good starting point I think. And while some of these ingredients are most commonly used in Asian cooking, just know that I’ve used dark soy sauce and fish sauce in a Spanish chickpea soup just a couple of weeks ago, and it made all the difference.

Enjoyed this Chicken Katsu? Have a look at these

If you’re on Asian food kick, we’re with you. So here’s a few recipes that you might want to try out