Easy recipe behind this tonkatsu rice bowl uses just eight simple ingredients.

There are a number of famous casual restaurant chains in Japan that offer quick and tasty rice bowl options, but when it comes to katsudon, bowls of fried breaded tonkatsu pork on rice, many people sing the praises of the Fuji Soba restaurant chain.

To the uninitiated, Fuji Soba might sound like the place to go for soba noodles — and it certainly is — but their katsudon rice bowls are a firm favourite amongst customers. Known for being hearty, tasty, and reasonably priced, their katsudon is the kind of warming comfort food that customers often wish they could make at home but don’t know where to start.

Now, as more and more people stay indoors to help stop the spread of coronavirus, Fuji Soba has extended a kind-hearted gesture to their katsudon-loving customers by sharing a recipe that’s incredibly simple to make at home. All you need is eight ingredients and a microwave. Let’s take a look at how it’s done below!

Ingredients (makes one serving)

  • Sugar – 15 grams (1 tablespoon)
  • Dashi granules – 3 grams (half a teaspoon)
  • Soy sauce – 20 millilitres ( 1 tablespoon and 1 teaspoon)
  • Water – 60 millilitres (4 tbsp)
  • Sliced onion – 20 grams (about one-eighth of an onion)
  • Tonkatsu
  • 1 egg
  • Rice

Buying a pre-prepared tonkatsu (breaded fried pork cutlet) is easy in Japan, but outside Japan you could use a frozen crumbed chicken cutlet instead. Once you’ve cooked up some rice in a rice cooker, you’ll have five ingredients left to work with, and it’s incredibly simple to put them together.

Method

1. Mix the sugar, dashi, soy sauce and water together to make a sauce.

2. Add the sliced onion to the sauce, cover with cling wrap and heat it in the microwave at 500 Watts for one minute.

3. Add the pork cutlet to the sauce and onion mix, pour over the lightly beaten egg, cover with cling wrap and heat it in the microwave at 500 Watts for two minutes.

4. Put the mixture on top of a bowl of rice and you’re done!

If you’ve eaten katsudon at Fuji Soba before, you’ll know just how similar this completed dish looks to the original. We were surprised at how good it looked ourselves, but as we all know, the proof is in the tasting.

We took a bite and were instantly swept out of our mundane apartment and into the warm and relaxed environment of a table for one at Fuji Soba. The sauce and egg clung to the tonkatsu pieces perfectly, delivering a fantastic dose of flavour with every mouthful.

As for the flavour, it tasted just like the katsudon served at Fuji Soba. In fact, we’d go so far as to say it tasted even better, due to the fact that it was freshly made by our own hands.

We never thought we’d ever be able to recreate Fuji Soba’s katsudon so perfectly, let alone have it all done in just three minutes in the microwave! Now that we’ve made it once, this dish will definitely be appearing on our dinner table again on a weekly basis, along with our homemade Yoshinoya beef bowls, and this Ghibli-inspired rice porridge from Kiki’s Delivery Service.

Related: YouTube/名代富士そば , Fuji Soba official website
Photos © SoraNews24
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