FEATURE: Cooking With Anime - Katsu Piroshki from "Yuri!!! on ICE"
Make some new friends with this delicious and hearty snack!

Where do I even begin to talk about this show? Should I start with the awesome opening song? The impressively not horrible incorporation of CGI into the ice skating routines? The great character development? No, no, let's instead start with Russian Yuri's grandfather, Grandpa Plisetsky. That guy has some serious cooking skills, because his Katsu Pirozhki is both delicious and kinda difficult to master.
This pirozhki has a glorious 5 layers- pork, katsu breading, egg, rice, and finally bread. It's an awesome twist on the popular Japanese food, katsu don. This snack packs a punch- it makes you really full after eating it, but, if you do make it, it tastes amazing, especially with worcestershire or steak sauce. But man, it took me somewhere between 3-4 hours to assemble. If you've made the traditional katsu version of this before, it's not much more complex than that, but there are some extra steps that take time.
What is a pirozhki, you may ask? Traditionally, they're yeasted, individual-sized baked or fried buns filled with some kind of fruit or vegetable filling. There are many different variations of this kind of bun, found in many different countries around the same region, but many have some kind of regional difference. The style of pirozhki I used here is the style most commonly associated with Russia. Typically it features a cabbage and meat filling-obviously we're going a little off-book today.
I personally struggled with the dough a little - bread dough is really not hard to make, but something I think I could have done to improve it would be to knead it a bit more when first stirring ingredients together. The dough was pretty sticky at the end, and I think it needed a bit more flour + elbow grease to develop the gluten appropriately. So, if you try this, don't be afraid to knead to your heart's content! Dough should be elastic but not overly sticky to the touch.
The good news is that it's kinda hard to mess these up. Despite my dough not working out perfectly, they still tasted and looked amazing in the end, which was good enough for me. These are fun to make- especially with friends- and are a must if you want to taste the snack that brought the two Yuris together (sorta) in a heart-poundingly adorable moment.
Check out the video below for a visual on instructions. Ingredients are listed just below.
Ingredients
Makes 6 Pirozhki
Pirozhki Yeast Starter:
- 1/2 cup milk
- 1 tbsp sugar
- 1/2 tbsp yeast
Pirozhki Dough:
- Yeast starter
- 2 tbsp butter, melted
- 1 egg
- 1/2 cup milk
- 1 tsp salt
- 3 cups flour
Katsu:
- 3 pork chops
- salt and pepper
- flour
- egg
- panko bread crumbs
Egg filling:
- 4 eggs
- 1 tbsp mirin
- 1/2 tbsp soy sauce
- salt
- about 1/3 cup frozen peas
- Egg yolk
- about 1 tbsp water