Fish Finger Katsu Curry.
Ready in just 30 minutes it's a mash-up of two classic British favourites.
I’ve mentioned before how much I hate the photography part of being a food writer (second only to the videography part), right? There is nothing more frustrating than perfecting a recipe, then trying again and again to get the pictures right for my blog, and none of them doing the dish justice. That’s what happened to this Fish Finger Katsu Curry. It’s a brilliant dish that took me absolutely ages to tweak to just right, and the only good picture I seemed to be able to take of it was the ‘this was my lunch’ snapshot complete with spotty socks that have a hole in the bottom on my phone.
But the beauty of Substack, however, is it is about the words and the recipes, and not the pictures. So, as a completely random recipe I think you should make for dinner tonight, I present my Fish Finger Katsu Curry!
If you think about it, a Fish Finger Katsu Curry is a really obvious thing of the ‘katsu’ genre to make for dinner. The brilliant Tim Anderson wrote an excellent piece for
earlier this year about ‘The Katsuification of Britain’ noting how as a nation we’d gone a step too far turning everything from crisps to toddler food (yes, really) katsu flavoured. This Fish Finger Katsu is not that.He digs more in the essay into the history of katsu curry, and how you’d usually see it presented in Japan: breaded and fried pork or chicken cutlets served with rice and a curry sauce, sometimes dotted with lumps of vegetables. In Britain, katsu curry gained popularity as probably the only menu item more popular than yaki soba at Wagamama (for my American readers, it’s a relatively healthy Japanese chain restaurant with communal seating), presented as a mound of rice atop a sliced breaded chicken cutlet with a generous ribbon of curry sauce poured over the top, with a side salad.
Even chefs and food writers I know who would not dream of keeping anything processed in their freezers keep fish fingers (or again to my American readers, fish sticks). They’re easy, nostalgic, comforting, make a great sandwich and are essential to making Nigella Lawson’s cult, perfect, Fish Finger Bhorta. I’m not the only one who can now see how their breaded protein perfection is perfect for katsu, right? And because they cook really well in the air fryer, you won’t even need to turn on the oven.
I spent a lot of time trying to get the curry sauce work for this. I knew I wanted to steer clear of the pre-made Wagamama paste you can get in supermarkets, or any pastes or blends that did not have international equivalents. Either mixing my own Japanese curry powder from scratch, or using a Japanese product seemed the way to go.
Trying to mix my own curry powder, it turned out, did not end well, and left me making curries that just did not have a rich, vs. powdery mouth-feel. In the end, I opted for the convenience of curry roux, in a widely available brand (S&B) to use as my base, pimping the back-of-the-pack recipe with some fresh ginger which seemed like a good way to add another layer of flavour quite a few curry powder-based recipes I’d read in my research, and some coconut milk to lean into the British idea of what a Japanese katsu curry sauce should be.
Fish Finger Katsu Curry
Serves: 2, Preparation time: 5 minutes, Cooking time: 25 minutes
Obviously, this curry sauce recipe will work in any katsu curry format, from chicken to pork, from prawn to aubergine. If you own a mini-chopper, don’t skip on blitzing the ginger and the onion for the sauce as it will make a much smoother texture.
The curry roux pictured comes in one big block of five portions that are easily breakable off the main block. When I call for one curry roux below, I mean one of those blocks of five.
1 small or 1/2 large brown onion, roughly chopped