Katsusando
Japanese Classics
If you’ve ever been on a bullet train in Japan, you’ve probably fallen in love
with these little finger-sized sandwiches that you can buy at the train station
before you get on board.
Katsusando is short for “cutlet sandwich” and it's a pork cutlet covered with tonkatsu sauce between two slices of thick, Japanese-style white bread. It sounds simple (and it is), but that's the beauty of it.
Ingredients
- 2 tbsp
- salted butter, softened
- 12
- thick slices soft, white bread (preferably Japanese-style shokupan)
- ¼ tsp karashi (Japanese mustard), or hot English mustard
- ¼ cup
- Japanese mayonnaise (Kewpie or similar)
- 2 cups
- finely shredded cabbage
- 4 cooked loin tonkatsu
- ¼ cup tonkatsu sauce, or express tonkatsu sauce (or you can use a bottled sauce like otafuku)
Method
- Butter the bread. Place three slices of bread side by side on a tea towel or piece of plastic wrap.
- Mix together the mustard and mayonnaise and spread that mixture over the butter.
- Place two tonkatsu along the length of the bread on the tea towel and cover the tonktasu generally with the tonkatsu sauce, top with a little shredded cabbage and place three further slices of bread on top (butter-down).
- Fold the tea towel over the sandwiches and place a heavy chopping board on top to press them for 10 minutes.
- Cut the crusts off each sandwich and then cut each into thirds. Repeat for the remaining bread and tonkatsu and serve.
Tips
- Choose thick-sliced soft white bread. If the bread is sliced too thin, after it is pressed it will be too firm.
- You can make this with fillet katsu (hirekatsu) as well, but you will need roughly 1.5 fillet katsu per sandwich as they are a different size.
- There are lots of offcuts here (crusts, end pieces of the katsu) as a result of creating the perfectly aligned presentation. Don't let them go to waste. EAT THEM!
