Japanese fried cream sando
Units
Temperature
Servings
Ingredients
Filling
- 250 ml cold heavy cream rounded
- 25 g icing sugar rounded
- 2 ml vanilla extract rounded
- 150 g strawberries, hulled, sliced (optional) rounded
Bread
- 4 thick slices soft white sandwich bread, shokupan-style milk bread if you can get it, about 2.5 cm thick rounded
- 250 ml neutral oil, for shallow-frying rounded
To finish
- 10 g icing sugar, for dusting rounded
Method
Method
- Whip the cream with the icing sugar and vanilla to stiff peaks. Cover and keep it in the fridge while you fry the bread; it needs to stay cold for the hot-and-cold contrast to work.
- Heat the oil in a skillet over medium heat to 180°C. Fry the bread slices one or two at a time, turning every 30 seconds or so, until both sides are deep golden and the crust has crackled, about 2 minutes a side. Lift onto a wire rack; do not stack the slices while hot, or the crust steams soft.
- While each slice is still hot, slice it in half on the diagonal to make two triangles, then cut a deep pocket into the cut side of each triangle without slicing all the way through.
- Pipe or spoon the cold whipped cream generously into each pocket, tuck in a few strawberry slices if using, and dust with icing sugar.
- Serve immediately. The contrast between the hot, crisp bread and the cold cream is the entire point, and it is gone within minutes.
Notes
- Frying the bread plain and filling it afterward, rather than freezing the assembled sandwich before frying, is the safe route for a home stove: a home fryer runs less consistently than a shop deep-fryer, and cream that leaks out of a frozen sandwich into 180°C oil spatters violently.
- Fry one or two slices at a time. Crowding the pan drops the oil temperature and the bread absorbs oil instead of crisping.
- A splatter guard or a deep, heavy skillet is worth using; shallow-frying thick bread in hot oil throws more spatter than a thin cutlet.
- This does not keep. Fry and fill to order, the same afternoon you plan to eat it.
- Kinako (roasted soybean flour) dusted over the cream instead of icing sugar is the more traditional Japanese finish, alongside a thin drizzle of brown sugar syrup. Kinako is rare outside Asian grocers in Germany; toasted, finely ground hazelnuts stirred with a little icing sugar make a reasonable stand-in with a similar toasty note, though the flavour is closer to praline than to kinako’s roasted-soybean taste.