Japanese Style Croquettes

Hello everyone! I wanted to try something a little different from my normal instructables and branch out a bit, so I convinced my wife to help me make one of my favorite foods, Japanese style croquettes. In case you're curious, croquettes essentially fried balls of mashed potatoes filled with various tasty treats.

This recipe is based off a few Japanese recipes found online and is fairly simple to put together. While the delicacy didn't originate in Japan, it is a fairly popular food and rather delishious. We'll be making corn and beef croquettes in this bible, though you can really make them with almost any filling.

I learned a lot of things during this process, first and foremost being that I should not be trusted to fry things on the stove unsupervised. Or maybe at all.

Regardless I hope you enjoy!

Equipment and Ingredients

Equipment:
Pot
Two frying pans, one deep enough to deep fry your golden brown morsels of joy in
A masher
Knife and cutting boards
Vegetable peeler
Wooden spoons
And mixing bowls

Ingredients:

Mashed potatoes-
8 - 10 medium sized potatoes
Butter
Milk
Salt and pepper

Fillings-
Can of corn (drained)
Pound of beef
1 medium white onion
Vegetable oil
Salt and pepper

Breading-
Panko breadcrumbs
Flour
Eggs

Mashing Potatoes

Ah the noble spud, perhaps my favorite food. So versatile. So delicious.

For this recipe you can use leftover mashed spuds or make them fresh, whichever you want. For those of you that need a crash course (such as myself) it's pretty simple to do.

Peel your potatoes and toss them into a pot over medium high heat to boil. Once they've become soft drain the liquid and get to mashing adding butter and milk to the equation as you go. Add some salt and pepper to taste and set them off to the side.

Oh and pro-tip, chop up your potatoes into chunks before tossing them into the pot to speed the cutting process.

Cooking the Innards

While the corn will not need to be cooked before integration, the beef definitely needs to be unless you like salmonella.

Go ahead and chop up an onion and toss in in a pan with a light coat of vegetable oil over medium heat. Cook down the onions until they "sweat" and toss in the ground beef. Add some salt and pepper and stir it intermittently to ensure it doesn't burn. Once the meat is fully cooked go ahead and cut the heat, drain off the fat and set the pan of meat aside.

Some Assembly Required

Go ahead and divide your mashed potatoes equally between two mixing bowls. It's best if they are cool at this point because you'll need to be able to mold them by hand now.

Add the can of corn to one bowl and the beef and onion mixture to the other. Stir until they are fully combined.

At this point you're ready to ball up your croquettes. Gather a handful of spuds/filling and form it into a palm sized ball. Continue until the bowls are empty, and you should wind up with about 3 dozen croquettes.

Breading and Frying

We're in the home stretch now! You'll want to get a small bowl to hold a beaten egg or two to dip the croquettes in to help the panko and flour to adhere to. This is fairly simple, grab a croquette, dredge in flour, dip in egg and roll in the panko. Continue this somewhat tedious yet simple process until you coat them all.

Take your deep pan and put it on the range. Be Very Careful at this point. We'll be dealing with extremely hot oil. Also don't go over about medium heat or you run the risk of fire. Not that I know that from past experiences or anything. At all. Moving on.

Fill the pan with enough oil to mostly submerge your croquettes. Once the oil has heated CAREFULLY place your first batch of croquettes in trying to avoid crowding them. I recommend using tongs to handle them at this point to avoid injuring yourself. Cook them until they gain a golden brown color and then flip them over cooking the other side until the color is uniform.

Remove the croquettes from the oil and onto a paper towel lined plate to soak off some of the oil and cool down.

Time to Enjoy

Once you've finished cooking the croquettes and they've cooled down sufficiently, it's time to enjoy the fruits of your labor. While you can eat them plain or with virtually any sauce, I highly recommend Bull-Dog Tonkatsu Sauce. It's kind of like a sweet BBQ sauce and can be found at some grocery stores in the Asian foods section or online at that purveyor of all things, Amazon.

I hope you enjoyed this instructable as much as I enjoyed eating these delicious treats!