Katsu Sando Ice (カツサンドアイス)

A katsu sando is sold cut on the diagonal, and the cut is what an ice cream version copies. Stand the two halves up and the cross-section reads at a glance: pale rectangles for crustless shokupan, a darker band for the pork cutlet, a stripe of dark caramel where the tonkatsu sauce would sit. The resemblance lives in that view. Ice cream holds a clean edge for a minute or two at room temperature, then the caramel bleeds into the layers, the corners round off, and the sharp bands slump into a puddle with a wafer floating in it. Anyone serving one has to cut, plate and photograph it fast, so it belongs to a counter with a camera pointed at it far more than to a lunchbox.

The format underneath is Japan's ice sandwich, a convenience-store staple. It runs from the monaka shell, a thin crisp wafer baked from glutinous rice that traditionally holds sweet bean paste, to soft cake or cookie layers pressed around a slab of ice cream. Seven-Eleven Japan has run limited ice sandwiches clamping vanilla ice cream between large Country Ma'am cookies, and another with butter-flavoured ice cream inside butter cookies. Bite through a monaka and the wafer snaps with a dry, papery crack before the cold reaches the teeth, then softens against the ice cream within a minute. Cookie versions give way instead, chewy at the rim and gone to paste wherever they touch the filling.

Dressing that format as a cutlet sandwich takes a few borrowed cues. A square of sponge or wafer stands in for the bread, since shokupan is cut crustless and almost white, with a tight, even crumb that a block of vanilla can mimic. The cutlet is harder. Real tonkatsu is pork under a coat of coarse panko, so the copy needs a darker, denser layer, chocolate or coffee ice cream, with cocoa or toasted crumb pressed along its outer edge to read as fried crust. The copy makes no attempt at the taste of pork, so the likeness stops at the eye. A closed pair of baked layers around a filling makes it a sandwich by structure, wafer for bread and ice cream for the middle, the same as any ice cream sandwich.

The flavour is dessert, and the overlap with the savoury original is narrow. Dark caramel with a salt edge comes closest to the fruit-and-spice depth of tonkatsu sauce, and roasted-soy flour, kinako, in a cookie layer carries some of the nuttiness of fried crumb. Cold flattens both, since frozen food tastes less sweet and less salty than it will once it thaws. A maker has to choose between a plate that photographs as a cutlet sandwich and a bite that works as ice cream, and the second is the one a customer buys twice.

Eating one runs in a set order. Hold it by the wafer or cookie edge, bite from the corner where the bands are thickest, and the first mouthful is all crunch, with the cold arriving at the back of the teeth a second later. The caramel stripe runs first, so it is eaten from the top down. Within a couple of minutes at summer room temperature the slab drips from its seams, and the cutlet band slumps before the vanilla around it if it is the softer of the two, since a dense ice cream holds a shape longer than an airy one. Eaten fast it is a decent ice cream with a joke in its cross-section; eaten slowly it turns to wet cookie on a plate.

Origin and history

No maker, product name or launch date for a katsu sando ice cream is on record in Japan. The format it plays inside is well dated. Morinaga's Choco Monaka Jumbo, ice cream pressed between chocolate-lined wafers, is generally dated to 1972 under the name Choco Monaka, and Morinaga describes ice cream monaka as a form grown out of the older bean-paste sweet. The monaka shell itself is older still, though sources split on its start: some place it in the Edo period, crediting a rice-cracker shop in the Yoshiwara district, while others put the filled, shaped wafer in the Meiji era.

The step from bean paste to ice cream waited on home freezers and convenience-store freezer cases, and by the time those were everywhere the ice sandwich was ordinary enough to parody. The one dated gelato katsu sando comes from Sydney. In October 2017 Gelato Messina sold a Kamikaze Katsu Sandwich at the Night Noodle Markets in Hyde Park: a slice of sudachi lime gelato coated in red velvet cake and panko, deep-fried, drizzled with yuzu sauce and set between two slices of white bread.