BY ANDREW WARNER
fashionfruit. managing editor
Rev up those fryers and give this week’s summer-inspired playlist a listen: fashionfruit. week 43
I’ve talked about this a lot on here, but the number of dishes I’ve only ever tried as a vegan or vegetarian is really quite high. While I do love eating plant-based dishes, I often wish I had waited to go vegetarian a bit, if only so that I could taste an authentic reuben (tempeh reubens are just so good that I can’t imagine how great one with actual pastrami tastes).
This week’s recipe is one of those things I wish I had tasted in my pre-veggie days. I’d always seen boxes of Japanese curry sitting on the aisles of my local grocery store, but I never thought much of them. Occasionally the boxes would catch my attention long enough for me to wonder how Japanese curry was different from any other curry, and I’d pull up the Wikipedia page on it, but I never did try it until I came to college, about four years after I first went vegetarian.
There’s a dining hall at UCLA that focuses specifically on take out food called Rendezvous – one of their weekly specials was chicken katsu curry, which is exactly what it sounds like: crispy, breaded chicken katsu cutlets served with a Japanese curry sauce. The vegetarian counterpart was made with tofu, and out of sheer curiosity one day, I decided to give it a go.
It wasn’t very good at all, but I blame the dining hall on this one. The dish was thrown together with little to no effort, and the tofu wasn’t even breaded or fried; it was simply tossed into the slimy, thin sauce of stewed vegetables and curry, cut into gelatinous cubes that fell apart when you tried to eat them.
I couldn’t make it through two or three bites before I had to give up. It wasn’t a pleasant meal. But I knew there was potential. One of my go-to meals when I’m in a hurry is tofu katsu – a favorite of mine because it only takes a few minutes to cook, since unlike chicken katsu, you don’t have to worry about the meat inside cooking fully. I knew that if the tofu were prepared properly, the curry could complement it quite well.
After doing a bit of research on different vegan blogs, I came up with this recipe for the curry sauce – if we’re being quite honest, I have no idea how accurate it actually is to the traditional flavors. But this seemed like the closest thing I could reproduce, based on the other blogs I looked at.
Stewing the apples, onions and carrots together ensures that they all soften up really nicely and make for the perfect texture. I puréed half of my sauce, leaving it a bit chunky so that I could get the benefit of all the different textures of the vegetables, but some recipes I saw said to purée the whole thing – it’s really up to you and what you want though!
Apples seem like a bit of an odd choice for a savory dish like this – but I promise, they’re the perfect ingredient here. They add just the right touch of sweetness to complement the warm flavors of the garam masala, but they also impart a bit of tang to the overall dish, which is also much appreciated here. After trying this recipe, I’ll definitely be trying to see what other savory dishes I can sneak apples into!
Got a question for Andrew? Email him at andrewjw@ucla.edu or tweet @awarner_db.
the recipe
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