Food: Tofu Curry and Curry Pan

I like to watch a lot of cooking shows because I'm already amazed at the wonderful things people can just seemingly produce from foods that are just sitting there in the grocery store. For some reason I have this illogical misconception in the back of my mind that is always telling me "Oh, you see that restaurant food? You can only make that if you have culinary training, a great kitchen and tools, and all the freshest, most expensive ingredients from around world. That's why you pay for it because you can't make this yourself". Well, for the most part I still feel that's true, haha. But that doesn't mean I can't still attempt!

I'm subscribed to a Japanese cooking channel on youtube and one of the recipes I really like the look of and wanted to try was Tofu Curry/Fried Curry Pan from runnyrunny999. Check out the video:


So last night I went to the local GrandMart Asian food store, stocked up on necessary ingredients and gave it try.


The ingredients I'd be using for the task at hand. I've never actually cooked with some of this stuff (ginger, curry powder, Bulldog Brand sauce, tofu and even ground pork). I didn't really clean up enough to give myself a good working space but ingredients that went in together I just combined into one container.


Sauteed minced onions, then added ginger and garlic. After getting that aromatic smell I added ground pork. While browning the pork meat I found that it surprisingly didn't let out as much oil/fat as I'd normally get when browning ground beef. Added and mixed in curry powder and flour after pork was cooked.


Guess this would have been considered the "wet phase" of the dish. Diced tomato and tomato juice, Bulldog Brand sauce (a sweet, Japanese specific sauce used for things like pork tonkatsu), and soy sauce added to give it that proper curry texture and to even it out after adding the curry powder and flour.


After another good mixture chunks of tofu were added to the curry. Now, despite being called tofu curry this dish is by and large mostly pork, so people who are hesitant to trying it because of the word 'tofu' or who might think it's a vegetarian dish you couldn't be more wrong. The tofu almost gets lost in the mixture and is sort of hidden as an aftertaste as it takes on the flavoring of everything else. After the tofu was added the curry was essentially complete. Let it simmer a bit, then combine with some rice.

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I realized midway cooking the curry that I hadn't started any rice at all. This was fine because it gave me time to attempt the other portion of the recipe, fried curry pan (bread).


The basic ingredient setup. One glaring difference was that after coming back from the store I realized I didn't have panko bread crumbs. Luckily, I did have some sort of Italian seasoning bread crumbs stored away in the pantry from well over a year ago. The consistency of these was also small and light like panko, so it worked out well in addition to providing some extra flavor.


Here I've got the scoop of curry in the center of one slice of bread with the edges brushed with egg wash. I then combined the two pieces of bread together and crimped their edges tightly so that it wouldn't inadvertently open up during the fry process.


Gave the entire outside of the curry packet a good brushing with egg wash and then covered it entire in bread crumbs. I don't have a normal deep fryer, so I filled a little soup pot about half way with vegetable oil and heated it up. Should I be using vegetable oil for deep frying things? I really don't know.


The final product of the fried curry pan. The one on the right was actually the second one to be fried. There was a whole lot of leftover crumbs from the first one in the pot that continued to heat up and brown in the oil, so when the second one was put into the pot it took on a whole lot of those darker crumbs and I guess the oil was also a bit dirtier, too. They both still tasted fine.


Final curry product on top of bowl of rice. Very good stuff. I maybe could have used a bit more spicy curry, so maybe next time.


See all that black, burnt looking stuff at the bottom of the pot? Those are leftover crumbs from the curry pan that just continued to fry. I would love to know a method of avoiding getting all that next time aside from putting everything in at once or changing out the oil. Was it the ingredients I used, or maybe the oil was too hot? I'm not really certain about any of the measurements I used in these dishes. I was pretty much going entirely by eye.

This whole cooking experiment was actually a very fun thing for me. Used some new foods and cooking processes and just really enjoyed doing it. I also have some left over dinner for tonight, so that's one other less thing I need to buy. Must remember to add this recipe to my recipe book later on.