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The newest must-eat Japanese KitKats: Deep-fried KitKat katsu on sticks

Casey Baseel Oct 31, 2023
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Sweet, savory, and doubly lucky.

There’s no country on earth that loves KitKats quite like Japan. All of those amazing seasonal and regional-exclusive KitKat flavors, though, didn’t come about until after the standard KitKat’s big break in Japan, which it owes to a pun.

In Japanese, KitKat gets pronounced “Kitto Katto,” which sounds very close to the Japanese words kitto (“I think” or “I believe”) and katsu (“win” or “succeed”). When people noticed the similarity, they started gifting or carrying a pack of KitKats in their bag on important days, like entrance exams or job interviews, as a “I believe you/I will succeed” good-luck charm, making the chocolate wafers a symbol of hope, friendship, and emotional support.

But if you spend a lot of time thinking about Japanese food and Japanese linguistics, you might be ready to point out that katsu is also the Japanese word for deep-fried cutlets, which is why Japan is now getting deep-fried KitKats.

In hindsight, it seems like KitKat katsu are something that should have happened years ago. Better late than never, though, especially when fried foods and sweets are involved, and we can thank restaurant chain Kushi Katsu Tanaka for finally realizing the need to make this dessert a reality.

Kushi katsu, Tanaka’s marque menu item, are deep-fried morsels served on a skewer. It’s a broad culinary style adaptable to all sorts of meats, seafood, and vegetables. Dessert kushi katsu are much rarer, though not completely unheard of, but deep-fried KitKats are a bold new step for the kushi katsu culinary sphere.

Tanaka isn’t going into this timidly, either, as they’re offering three different kushi katsu KitKats. There’s the basic Kitto Kushi Katsu, pictured above, with two of the chocolate wafer sticks fried up for 150 yen (US$1). If you’re feeling fancy, there’s also the 170-yen Kitto Kushi Katsu Banana, which adds slices of banana as a pre-frying topping to the KitKat.

And for do-it-yourself-types, there’s the Make Your Own Kitto Kushi Katsu, a 290-yen set of two KitKat skewers and a cup of yogurt sauce to dip them in so you can then coat them in corn flakes, which are a popular ingredient in Japanese parfaits.

▼ With yogurt and cereal, you might even be able to convince yourself that this is a pretty sensible breakfast.

By the way, if you’re wondering if the good-luck properties associated with KitKat because it sounds like katsu are applied to the food that’s actually called katsu too, they are, and cutlets are also a popular meal choice for Japanese people on important days. So by that logic, eating these KitKat katsu should be doubly auspicious, and we should all probably try to consume as many as we can while they’re on the Kushi Katsu Tanaka menu from November 1 to 30.

Source: PR Times via IT Media
Images: PR Times
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