Tori katsu burgers

 I've come across chicken katsu before - in recipes and in Japanese restaurants.  I always thought it was a special way of cooking/crumbing the chicken.  So yesterday, trawling through some recipe sites (looking for some mid-week inspiration!), I came across chicken katsu burgers and I thought - "YES!  That will do admirably!".  And so I discovered that katsu is both the crumbed chicken (torikatsu) AND the sauce served with the chicken (tonkatsu sauce).  Ah ha!!  

So, it's basically a BBQ-style tomato-based sauce.  It was really easy to make and keeps well in the fridge for some time.  The batch I made was enough for drizzling over 5 torikatsu burgers, with enough leftover for probably another 5 burgers.  We reckon this sauce would also be fantastic with roasted pork, or even good ol' steak and chips.  Maybe with salmon?  Give it a try and see what you think...

1/2 cup tomato sauce

1/4 cup water

2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce

1 tbsp soy sauce

1 tbsp rice wine vinegar

1 tsp sugar

1 tbsp finely grated ginger (I used a microplane for this and the garlic)

2 cloves garlic, crushed or finely grated

1/4 tsp ground allspice (I was out of this so used mixed spice)

1. Mix all ingredients together in a small saucepan.  Stir over low-medium heat for about 10 minutes, until thickening.  Set aside until you need it (can be used cold or heated back through).   

For the burgers themselves I used mezzo breads from Volare (local specialty baker), but whatever burger buns you fancy will do (the photo with the black brioches was from Nadia Lim's MyFoodBag - I forgot to take a decent photo of our burgers before we got hungry and ate them!!).  I liked the fact that the mezzo were light and quite slim.  A bulky bun with crumbed anything can be a bit too much sometimes.  But up to you.  And toasted buns - yes please for me, but again - up to the individual.  

The tori katsu - I cut into 2cm chunks and marinated 500 g of boneless, skinless chicken thighs (trimmed of fat and chewy sinewy bits).  The marinade was just a couple of tbsp each of soy sauce and rice wine vinegar, with a couple tbsp grated fresh ginger.  When ready to cook, shake piece of chicken off, dredge in flour, then egg, then panko crumbs, and cook in pan of hot melted butter.  

Build your burgers by smearing some good thick mayo on one half of the bun, pile with coleslaw (ours had grated carrot, red cabbage, beetroot, chopped spinach, spring onions and red onion) and tori katsu, then drizzle with the katsu sauce and top with remaining half of bun.  Yum!!  Sounds labour intensive, but it really wasn't - get the sauce done earlier, and you can even buy some coleslaw from the deli, if time is short.