black curry experiment

In the four hundred years or so since Japan opened its ports to the West, the Japanese have been adapting Western food to their taste. One of my favorite examples of this is Japanese curry. It's a sweet, creamy version of its southeastern neighbors' dishes, and it goes great with katsu, a crisp, breaded pork tenderloin.

Japan is the land of easy-made food, so of course, most people buy roux bricks to make their curry at home. That's what I'd always done until No Recipes, one of my favorite food blogs, decided he'd come up with a from-scratch curry recipe. I was excited. Then, he decided he'd try something different and make a black curry. With chocolate in it. Oh, yes.

So I gave the black curry a go. I had to make a few of the ingredients to go in this dish, mayu and tonkatsu sauce, and this took a lot of time. But it was fun to be spending an entire afternoon cooking a good and creative meal. I even made an approximation of katsu by breading seitan with panko, Japanese bread crumbs.

Overall, the curry was a great meeting point of the sweetness of Japanese curry with the spices (cardamom, anise) of farther east and the inventiveness (chocolate) of the crazy U.S. Sam says the flavors didn't blend well; he thinks you could taste each one individually. But I thought it came out rather well. The seitan katsu was a little bland, and next time I'll marinate the seitan in something to give it a little more flavor before breading it.