Tonkatsu

Breaded, deep-fried until crisp and golden brown and then drizzled with a sweet and piquant sauce, meat doesn't get any better than Tonkatsu.

This popular Japanese dish is generally served with shredded cabbage. It is most commonly eaten with a type of thick Worcestershire sauce called tonkatsu sauce or simply sōsu (sauce), karashi (mustard) and perhaps a slice of lemon. It is usually served with rice, miso soup and tsukemono and eaten with chopsticks. It may also be served with ponzu and grated daikon instead of tonkatsu sauce.

Tonkatsu is also popular as a sandwich filling (katsu sando) or served on Japanese curry (katsu karē). It is sometimes served with egg on a big bowl of rice as katsudon. In Nagoya and surrounding areas, miso katsu, tonkatsu eaten with a miso-based sauce, is a specialty.

Variations on tonkatsu may be made by sandwiching an ingredient such as cheese or shiso leaf between the meat, and then breading and frying. For the calorie conscious, konnyaku is sometimes sandwiched in the meat.

Several variations of tonkatsu use alternatives to pork:

• Chicken katsu uses chicken instead, often appears in Hawaiian plate lunches.
• Menchi-katsu or Minchi Katsu is a minced meat patty, breaded and deep fried.
• Hamu katsu, a similar dish made from ham, is usually considered a budget alternative to tonkatsu.
• Gyū katsu, also known as bīfu katsu, is popular in the Kansai region around Osaka and Kobe.
• Saengseonkkaseu is a Korean fish cutlet modeled on the Japanese dish. Tonkatsu in Korea is known as donkkaseu or donkaseu, a simple transliteration of the Japanese word to Korean.

A similar cuisine with ingredients other than pork, beef or chicken is called furai (fry), not katsu (cutlet), such as aji-furai (fried horse mackerel) and ebi-furai (fried prawn).