We strip four pork cutlets down to their fighting weights and see who’s got the most meat inside.

Japan loves tonkatsu (pork cutlet). It can be eaten as-is, often accompanied by sides of rice and cabbage, or it can be used as a building block to make katsudon (a pork cutlet rice bowl with egg and/or sauce), put between slices of bread as a katsu sandwich, or covered with roux to make katsu curry.

Being so popular and versatile, tonkatsu is a mainstay in the prepared food sections of Japanese supermarkets. However, whenever we find ourselves staring longingly at super market tonkatsu (something that happens on a near-daily basis), we can’t help but wonder how much actual meat they have. We don’t think our tender hearts could handle the shock and disappointment of biting into tonkatsu only to come away with it feeling more like a mouthful of bread crumbs than a slab of delicious pork.

So we decided to become pioneers in the field of tonkatsu research by procuring pork cutlets from four major Japanese supermarket chains, removing all of their breading, and seeing which gives you the most actual meat for your yen.

Pictured clockwise from top-left in the photo below are tonkatsu from the supermarket chains Livin (part of the Seiyu group), York Foods (part of the 7-Eleven group), Aeon, and Life.

Let’s start this weigh-off with Life, who charges 429 yen for their pork cutlet.

Having never removed the breading from a cutlet before, we were surprised by how much time and effort it took. In the case of life’s tonkatsu, the breading had firmly attached itself to the meat, without a loose pocket of air between the two, which imparted a feeling of quality.

Once we had finally kneaded all of the breading off, we put Life’s tonkatsu on the scale…

…which showed a weight of 110 grams (3.9 ounces).

Next up was Livin, whose 459-yen tonkatsu comes conveniently pre-sliced into six pieces, which is especially handy if you’re thinking of using it for katsu curry.

Up on the scale it goes, and…

…it comes in even heavier than Life’s with 115 grams of pork.

At this point, we were thinking that all of our cutlets might end up in the 110/115 -gram ballpark, but when we weighed York Food’s 430-gram tonkatsu, which also comes pre-sliced…

…we discovered we had only 98 grams of pork! And the downsizing continued with Aeon’s 462-yen cutlet…

…which had a scant 79 grams of pork.

So as for meat mass, Livin is the winner here.
● Livin: 115 grams of meat
● Life: 110 grams of meat
● York Foods: 98 grams of meat
● Aeon: 79 grams of meat

What’s more important, though, is the cost performance of each, and calculated in terms of price per 100 grams of pork, Life is the value leader here, while Aeon is the most expensive, by a pretty wide margin.
● Life: 390 yen per 100 grams of meat
● Livin: 430 yen per 100 grams of meat
● York Foods: 438 yen per 100 grams of meat
● Aeon: 584 yen per 100 grams of meat

As for which one tastes the best? With taste-testing duties falling to our Japanese-language reporter Masanuki Sunakoma, he declares Livin’s tonkatsu the winner. Seasoned with mojio, salt made from seaweed, each bite of Livin’s tonkatsu is like a burst of concentrated umami, Masanuki says. Even at room temperature it retains a great texture with just the right amount of crispness to its breading, and so even if, at 495 yen, it’s the most expensive tonkatsu overall in this bunch, he thinks it’s worth it, especially since it’s also the second-best value in price per gram.

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