What’s your favorite sandwich?
If pressed to choose, I’d say a regular ol’ deli sub with lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber, peppers and my favorite vegan mortadella. But the honest answer is that I love too many sandwiches to choose just one.
When it was time to explore vegan Japanese food beyond ramen, of course I went with a katsu recipe. Katsu is delicious but wanted a sandwich instead of curry. And I needed to make it without it being too greasy.
For those of you who don’t know, Katsu is basically a panko-breaded cutlet that is fried. It’s simplified, I know, but this is just so we’re all starting from the same point.
Tofu Katsu?
I knew I’d use tofu for this vegan sandwich recipe because I figured it had the best integrity. But you could also use any type of vegan chicken filet if you were interested in trying that out.
I wanted this tofu katsu recipe to really work so I took the brick of tofu and cut it in half the long way and then cut that in half too so there were 4 pieces instead of just 2 big ones. I marinated the pieces in soy sauce, ground ginger, ground lemongrass, and garlic granules. I gave it all it good shake inside a plastic container and let it sit while I gathered the panko crumbs.
Because I wasn’t deep frying this, I didn’t have to make a whole breading station. I simply added garlic, parsley, salt and white pepper to the breadcrumbs and coated each piece of tofu.
Air Fryer Katsu
Yep, that’s right. Instead of deep or shallow frying, I chose to put these bad boys into the air fryer. I used a silicon oil brush bottle on the air fryer liner just to make sure the panko didn’t stick and I cooked it on 190°C/375°F for 10 minutes on one side and then 5 on the other. I know, it seems unbalanced but it worked well, as you can see.
For the Sauce
For the sauce, I mixed vegan barbecue sauce with ginger paste, Sriracha, soy sauce and vegan Worcestershire sauce. It was my attempt to mimic the tonkatsu sauce but I’m not sure I came close at all. But the sauce was really delicious and tangy with a depth of flavor that surprised even me.
And because I didn’t have milk bread and I wasn’t going to make it, I used simple burger buns because they’re fluffy the way Japanese milk bread looks and when crisped up, they didn’t even taste like burger buns!
Those are my hacks and it was a really fun vegan katsu sandwich. If you try it out, let me know what you do!
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Tell me what you think about this!