Japanese Katsu Curry Recipe with Potatoes, Carrots, and Peas

Prepare the base. Heat the vegetable oil in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add the chopped onions and sauté until they are soft and translucent, about 5-7 minutes. Add the minced garlic and ginger, and cook for another 1-2 minutes until fragrant.

Cook the vegetables. Add the diced carrots and potatoes to the pan. Stir and cook for about 5 minutes, allowing the vegetables to start softening.

Add spices and flour. Sprinkle the curry powder, garam masala and the 10 g of flour over the vegetables. Stir well to coat everything and cook for a minute or two. The point is not just to cook the flour out: frying ground spices in fat lets their aromas react with each other, so they taste like one spice blend rather than several separate powders.

Make the sauce. Gradually add the 475 ml of stock, stirring constantly to keep it smooth. Bring to the boil, then drop to a simmer and stir in the soy sauce, Worcestershire sauce and honey.

Simmer and thicken. Let the sauce simmer gently for 15 to 20 minutes, until the vegetables are tender and it coats the back of a spoon. Stir now and then so nothing catches. Start the rice and the cutlets while it simmers, since the sauce holds well and the cutlets do not.

Add peas. Add the frozen peas to the sauce and cook for another 5 minutes until they are heated through. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Prepare the cutlets. Butterfly each chicken breast: slice into it horizontally almost to the far edge and open it out like a book, then cut the two halves apart to give you four cutlets. Pound any thick patches with a mallet or the back of a knife until each one is an even centimetre thick. Even matters more than thin - a cutlet that is thick at one end and thin at the other cooks unevenly and dries out at the edges. Season both sides with salt and pepper just before coating.

Coat the cutlets. Beat the eggs with a tablespoon of oil. Set out three shallow dishes: flour, then the egg, then the panko. Dip each cutlet in flour and shake the excess off, then the egg, then press it firmly into the panko on both sides. Rest the coated cutlets for 5 to 10 minutes before they go anywhere near the oil. The oil in the egg and the rest are the two things that stop the crumb sliding off in the pan.

Fry the cutlets. Heat the oil to 170C in a deep frying pan or saucepan, about 2 cm deep. Fry the cutlets one or two at a time so the oil does not lose heat, about 3 minutes, turning once, until deep golden on both sides. Chicken wants to reach 74C in the middle. Lift each one out, let the oil drip off for a few seconds, and rest on a wire rack rather than kitchen paper, which traps steam and softens the underside. Slice after resting, not before, in single downward strokes.

Serve. Spoon the rice onto each plate, ladle the curry sauce beside it and lay the sliced cutlet alongside. Keep the sauce off the crumb: poured over, panko softens within a minute, which is the whole reason the cutlet was fried crisp.