Kado Big Katsu Fish Cutlet Snack Tonkatsu Sauce

The joke is in the name, and it takes a second to land.

Katsu means cutlet — the breaded, deep-fried pork that Japan built an entire cuisine around, served over rice as katsudon and under curry as katsu curry.

Big Katsu looks exactly like one: a flat golden-brown cutlet, breadcrumbed, glazed dark with sauce.

It contains no pork whatsoever.

Kado makes it from fish surimi, pressed thin, coated in panko and fried, then finished with tonkatsu sauce.

It is a cutlet impersonation, and it has been fooling and delighting Japanese schoolchildren for decades.

Big Katsu belongs to dagashi, the penny-snack tradition that is one of the genuinely distinctive corners of Japanese food culture.

Dagashi shops sold sweets and savouries for coins children could actually find in their pockets, and the makers competed on imagination rather than ingredients — hence a fish snack that pretends to be a pork cutlet, from a company, Kado, whose other famous products pretend to be grilled eel and vinegared octopus.

Each Big Katsu comes in its own flat sleeve, and the sheet inside is roughly the size of a playing card, thin and slightly chewy rather than crisp.

The flavour is tonkatsu sauce, which is worth explaining to anyone who has not met it: thick, dark, fruit-and-vegetable based, sweeter and more rounded than Worcestershire, the standard partner to anything fried in Japan.

Against the savoury fish base it produces something closer to a jerky than a crisp — salty, tangy, faintly sweet, and very hard to eat just one of. Japanese adults treat Big Katsu as a beer snack.

It also turns up on instant ramen as an improvised topping, which is exactly the sort of thing dagashi invites.

About this item
Item Name : Big Katsu Tonkatsu Sauce
Brand : Kado
Item Form : Processed Fish Food
Number of Items : 1 Sheet (Pack of 1)