How To Make Crispy Chicken Katsu at Home

Ordering chicken katsu at a Japanese restaurant guarantees you a few things: juicy chicken enveloped with shatteringly crisp breading, served with a sweet-tangy sauce that keeps you coming back for more. This from-scratch recipe promises the same, thanks to a few smart techniques anyone can master. Here’s how to make this Japanese favorite at home, best enjoyed with a pile of steamed rice and some refreshing cabbage slaw on the side.

The Japanese word katsu is a shortened form of the word katsuretsu, which means cutlet. Katsu is cutlets of meat that are coated in panko breadcrumbs and fried until crispy. Tonkatsu is made with thinly cut pork, but chicken katsu is just as popular today. It’s served with tonkatsu sauce, a Japanese puréed brown sauce made of fruits and vegetables.

Chicken katsu is made with easy-to-find ingredients you may already have on hand, making it a great go-to dish that doesn’t require a trip to the store. Here are the key ingredients you’ll need.

• Chicken: Boneless, skinless chicken breasts work well here, as they’re easy to thinly slice into even pieces.
• Panko breadcrumbs: Japanese panko breadcrumbs are made from crustless bread that’s processed into flakes that fry up extra crunchy. Don’t use regular fine breadcrumbs here.
• Flour and eggs: To get the breadcrumbs to adhere to the chicken, you’ll also need the standard ingredients for dredging: flour and beaten eggs.

Dishes using cutlets usually involve pounding out the meat first to get thin, even slices. But when researching chicken katsu, I discovered there’s an easier way to get thin pieces of meat instead: slicing at an angle. I saw this technique in Japanese cookbooks as well as in Andrea Nguyen’s recipe for katsu sandwiches in her book The Banh Mi Handbook.

To do this, start by checking the chicken breasts to see if the tenders are still attached. Chicken tenders are the little strip of meat that’s on the underside. If you find them, pull them off first and set them aside. They won’t go to waste and will be fried up for the katsu. Then cut the chicken crosswise on a slight diagonal, holding the knife almost parallel to the cutting board. Aim for slices about 1/3-inch thick, and don’t worry that the pieces aren’t uniform in shape since the chicken breasts are usually a bit thinner at each end.

Cutting the chicken this way is a lot easier than pounding out chicken and yields quite a number of pieces from just one pound. While you don’t get big pieces to serve each person, this method provides lots of surface area for the coating to adhere to and turn crispy.

Once the chicken is cut, dip the slices in flour, then beaten eggs, and finally the panko breadcrumbs. Now it’s time to fry. Heat a few cups of oil in a skillet to shallow fry, which yields crispy chicken but doesn’t require the amount of oil and come with the scariness of deep frying. Don’t be tempted to sear them in a little oil or bake instead — you won’t get the same delicious results.

Fry in a few batches until golden-brown, then serve with tonkatsu sauce, which is an easy mixture of ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, and a little sugar and cider vinegar to balance it all out. You can also buy tonkatsu sauce at Asian grocery stores, or skip it all together, but I like dipping each bite in a little sauce.

Chicken katsu is traditionally served with rice and a salad usually made of shredded lettuce or cabbage, but it’s also good in sandwiches or covered with curry sauce. Leftovers warm up quite nicely in the oven and can even be thrown onto salads.

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