Three minutes to paradise.

A few months ago, we covered how to make katsudon (a Japanese-style pork cutlet bowl) in just three minutes using a recipe from Japanese restaurant chain Fuji Soba. While it’s a super-easy and extra-tasty meal, there is one potential problem: to make it so quickly, you need access to a ready-made tonkatsu (pork cutlet), something that’s easy to find in a Japanese supermarket, but might not be so easy to find in your neck of the worldwide woods.

But this is an excellent time to point out that hearty Japanese cuisine includes not only katsudon, but also chicken katsudon, which uses a chicken cutlet. Those are pretty easy to find anywhere in the western world; you can get fried chicken cutlets at any grocery store or fried chicken take-out joint. So today we’re wondering, can the three-minute pork katsudon recipe work just as well for chicken katsudon?

To find out, we started with a visit to our local Family Mart convenience store, where we picked up one of the chain’s Famichiki chicken cutlets (the only fried chicken cutlets that are also otaku). This brings us to another advantage of using chicken: extra flavors and spices! Right now, Family Mart is offering an extra-spicy version of the Famichiki, so we grabbed one and headed back to the SoraKitchen where we assembled our ingredients.

● One fried chicken cutlet
● 1 egg
● Sugar (1 tablespoon)
● Soy sauce (1 tablespoon and 1 teaspoon)
● Dashi/Japanese bonito stock granules (1/2 teaspoon)
● Water (4 tablespoons)
● 1/8 sliced onion (roughly 20 grams [0.7 ounces])
● Cooked white rice

All right, let’s get cooking!

Step 1

Mix the sugar, dashi, soy sauce, and water in a dish to create the tare (the sweet and savory chicken katsudon sauce).

Step 2

Add the sliced onion, then cover the dish with plastic wrap and cook in the microwave for one minute.

Step 3

Remove the dish from the microwave. Slice the chicken cutlet into bite-size pieces and place the pieces in the dish with the sauce and onion. Crack the egg, beat it, and pour it over everything, cover the dish with plastic wrap again, and pop it back in the microwave for another two minutes.

Step 4

Remove the dish and place the cooked chicken cutlet, onion and egg over white rice.

Step 5

Fight the temptation to start eating immediately, and wait for the chicken katsudon to cool down just enough so that you can dig in without scalding your tongue.

We can’t stress the important of Step 5 enough, not only because we always want our readers to be safe, but also because searing your tongue and dulling your taste buds will deny you the pleasure of eating the chicken katsudon, and as we can attest from our taste test, it’s incredibly good. So yes, the three-minute pork cutlet bowl recipe does indeed work just as well as a three-minute chicken katsudon bowl, and now we’re wondering what other fried foods we can apply our new favorite recipe to.

Photos ©SoraNews24
● Want to hear about SoraNews24’s latest articles as soon as they’re published? Follow us on Facebook and Twitter!
[ Read in Japanese ]

Follow Casey on Twitter, where he loves how eating katsudon is supposed to bring you good luck in Japan.