You can say what you will about the Japanese, but they never take the easy way out. As if their version of breaded pork chop wasn’t already good enough, someone apparently thought tonkatsu too easy and uninvolving, so why not make a meat equivalent of the Napoleon and call it mille-feuille katsu?
Mille-feuille is French for “thousand leaves” and refers to the many layers of dough in puff pastry (up to 2,000 layers in modern Napoleon recipes, as per Wikipedia). The mille-feuille katsu is, as you may have already guessed, made of multiple layers of paper-thin slices of pork done katsu-style. Some restaurants have up to 25 layers per katsu, and while that is nowhere near a mille, you have to make the dish yourself to see how devilishly difficult it is to even come close. I asked the people at Monterey to slice the meat as thin as they could and I only managed eight layers per roll (from four slices, folded) — more than that and I was afraid the katsu would not cook all the way through.
I was right. Having read somewhere that it needed to cook at a low temp, I opted to go for the lowest in the deep-frying scale: 325℉. The rolls turned out wonderfully golden, but when I sliced one in half, it was still raw in the center! Notes for next time: (1) Since Monterey can not slice the meat any thinner, use one fewer slice per roll. (2) Get rid of excess moisture on both sides of each slice during assembly. (3) Start at a lower frying temp; maybe 275℉. And, (4) Prepare a back-up main dish, just in case.
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