Eat the Match: Netherlands vs Japan

Bitterballen and tonkatsu — what happens when one culture's technique enters another and the second culture improves on it.

Group Stage · Dallas · June 14, 2026 · Gusto

The Dutch arrived in Japan in 1600. They were the only Western nation permitted to remain after Japan closed its borders in 1635 — a period of nearly 220 years of near-total isolation from the outside world that the Japanese call sakoku. The Dutch stayed because they were merchants, not missionaries. They kept their religion to themselves. They were given an island in Nagasaki harbor called Dejima, and from that island, a filtered version of Western knowledge — Dutch learning, rangaku — entered Japan for two centuries.

One of the things the Dutch brought with them: the technique of frying in fat.

Japan had no tradition of deep-frying before European contact. What they did with it — over two centuries of adaptation, refinement, and the particular Japanese instinct to take a foreign idea and make it more itself than the original ever was — produced tempura, tonkatsu, and karaage. Three fried preparations the Dutch would not recognize as cousins and would, if they were honest, recognize as improvements.

Tonight the Netherlands and Japan play football at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. On this table, I am acknowledging what the kitchen already knows: the Dutch brought the technique. Japan took it somewhere else entirely.

The Dutch side — bitterballen.

The bitterbal is a Dutch masterpiece of very specific engineering. It is a sphere — exactly a sphere, not an oval, not a flattened disk, a sphere — of slow-cooked beef ragù that has been chilled until firm, rolled in flour, dipped in beaten egg, coated in breadcrumbs, and fried until the exterior is a precise deep gold and the interior has returned to molten. It is the national bar snack of the Netherlands. You eat it with Dutch mustard, standing up, in a brown café, while someone argues about football nearby.

The architecture is deliberate. The ragù must be firm enough cold to roll without falling apart and liquid enough warm to flow when bitten. This is achieved by cooking the beef in stock until it is deeply tender, then thickening the liquid with a roux until the whole mixture becomes almost solid when cooled. The gelatin from the beef and the starch from the roux work together. Too little roux and the center will not set firmly enough to roll. Too much and the filling turns rubbery and loses the flow that makes a bitterbal worth eating.

I have eaten bitterballen in Amsterdam, in Rotterdam, at Schiphol Airport at seven in the morning because I was there and they were there and some decisions require no further justification. The airport ones were acceptable. The ones made correctly — from a proper veal stock, from beef that has braised long enough to give up everything it has — are a different experience.

Ingredients

Method

  1. Braise the beef. Place the beef, stock, onion, bay leaf, thyme, and garlic in a heavy pot. Bring to a gentle simmer, cover, and cook over low heat for 2 to 2.5 hours until the beef is completely tender and falls apart when pressed. The liquid should have reduced by roughly a third. Remove the beef with a slotted spoon. Strain the braising liquid and reserve 200ml. Let the beef cool slightly, then pull it apart into very fine shreds — not chunks. Season well.
  2. Make the roux. In a separate saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat. Add the flour and cook, stirring constantly, for 2 minutes. You are cooking out the raw flour taste. The mixture — a roux — should smell faintly nutty and look pale gold. Add the reserved braising liquid gradually, whisking constantly. The mixture will look alarmingly lumpy and then, as you keep whisking, will smooth out and thicken. Cook over medium-low heat, stirring, for 4 minutes until the mixture is very thick — considerably thicker than a béchamel. It should hold a line when you drag a spoon across the bottom of the pan.
  3. Add the shredded beef, parsley, and a few gratings of nutmeg to the roux mixture. Stir to combine thoroughly. Season with salt and white pepper. The filling should taste concentrated and deeply savoury. Transfer to a wide shallow dish or tray, press plastic wrap directly onto the surface, and refrigerate for at least 2 hours — overnight is better. The mixture must be completely cold and firm before you can roll it.
  4. With cold, damp hands, roll the firm filling into balls of approximately 25–30g each — roughly the size of a large walnut. Work quickly. If the mixture begins to soften, return it to the refrigerator for 15 minutes. Place the balls on a tray lined with baking paper as you go.
  5. Set up your coating station: flour in one shallow bowl, beaten egg in a second, breadcrumbs in a third. Roll each ball first in flour (shake off the excess), then dip in egg (let the excess drip), then roll firmly in breadcrumbs until completely coated with no gaps. A gap in the coating means a gap in your structure — hot oil will enter and the bitterbal will explode in the fryer, which I have witnessed once and do not wish to witness again. Place coated balls back on the tray. Refrigerate for 30 minutes to firm the coating.
  6. Heat the oil in a deep, heavy pot to 180°C (356°F). Use a thermometer. This is not a suggestion. At this temperature, the exterior will crisp and set before the interior heats enough to flow — which is the entire structural logic of the bitterbal. Below 170°C and the coating absorbs oil and goes soft. Above 190°C and the outside darkens before the filling warms through.
  7. Fry in batches of 4–5, never more. Overcrowding drops the oil temperature and produces pale, greasy bitterballen. Fry for 3 to 4 minutes, turning once halfway, until deeply golden and the exterior sounds hollow when tapped with a spoon. Drain on a rack, not paper towels — paper traps steam and softens the crust. Serve immediately with mustard. They do not wait.

Why 180°C is not a rough guide — it is the architecture

A bitterbal is a sphere of cold, firm, rich filling inside a thin layer of breadcrumbs. The frying process has one job: heat the exterior enough to crisp and set the crust before the interior liquefies and begins to put pressure on it. At 180°C, this happens in sequence — exterior sets, interior warms. At 165°C, the crust sets too slowly, absorbs oil, and goes soggy before the interior reaches the right temperature. At 195°C, the crust darkens and burns before the interior can flow properly, giving you a hard shell around a still-cold filling. The 180°C target exists because that is the temperature at which the timing of these two processes aligns. A thermometer is not kitchen anxiety. It is precision.

On the mustard: Dutch mustard. Not English mustard, which is too sharp. Not American yellow mustard, which is not happening. Zaanse Mosterd is the correct choice — grainy, mild, slightly sweet. A good French Dijon with whole grains is the acceptable substitute. The bitterbal and its mustard are a considered pairing. Treat it as one.

The Japanese side — tonkatsu.

In 1899, a Western-style restaurant in Tokyo called Rengatei served what they called katsuretsu — a fried pork cutlet in the French style, coated in breadcrumbs. They were adapting the European Wiener Schnitzel, which they had learned about through the rangaku tradition and later Meiji-era diplomatic contact. They used breadcrumbs. They used pork. They fried in oil rather than in lard. Over the following decades, the dish was refined, adjusted, and claimed. By the mid-twentieth century it was simply tonkatsu — from katsu (cutlet) and ton (pork) — and it was Japanese.

The Japanese change: panko breadcrumbs instead of European fine breadcrumbs. This is not a small detail. Panko — Japanese bread flakes made from bread baked without crusts and then dried — produces a crust that is dramatically lighter, coarser, and crispier than European breadcrumbs. Where a Wiener Schnitzel has a tight, fine crust that adheres closely to the meat, tonkatsu has an open, airy structure that shatters when you cut it and stays crisp longer on the plate. The technique is the same. The result is completely different.

The pork cut is also specific. Ton-katsu is made from pork loin (rosu) or pork fillet (hire). The loin is fattier and more flavored; the fillet is leaner and more tender. I prefer the loin, because the fat makes the difference between a cutlet that stays interesting across the full cut and one that dries out by the third bite. The choice is yours. I have told you mine.

The sauce is tonkatsu sauce — a dark, thick, sweet-savory condiment of Worcestershire, fruit, and soy that functions as the Japanese equivalent of ketchup. It is not optional. It is half the dish.

Ingredients

Method

  1. Make the sauce first. Combine all sauce ingredients in a small bowl and whisk until smooth. Taste. It should be sweet, sour, salty, and slightly complex — like a condensed umami. Adjust with Worcestershire if it needs more depth, ketchup if it needs sweetness. Set aside. It will keep refrigerated for two weeks.
  2. Prepare the pork. Place each cutlet between two sheets of plastic wrap or baking paper. Pound lightly with a meat mallet or rolling pin to an even 1cm thickness — not thinner. You are evening out the thickness so the cutlet cooks uniformly, not tenderizing. Tenderizing pork loin aggressively produces mush. Season both sides with salt and white pepper.
  3. Set up the coating station: flour in one shallow dish, beaten egg in a second, panko in a third — and give the panko some space. Do not compress it into the dish. Panko that is compressed loses its structure before it even goes in the oil.
  4. Dredge each cutlet in flour, shaking off any excess — a thin, even film, nothing more. Dip in beaten egg, letting the excess run off. Press firmly into the panko on one side, flip, and press on the other. The panko should adhere in a thick, uncompressed layer. Pick up the cutlet and examine the edges — coat them too. Every surface.
  5. Heat the oil to 170°C (338°F). Tonkatsu fries slightly cooler than bitterballen — the cutlet is flat and larger, and the pork needs more time to cook through. At 170°C the exterior crisps at the right rate while the interior reaches 65°C without rushing. Above 180°C the panko browns before the pork is cooked. Below 160°C the cutlet sits in oil, absorbs it, and goes heavy.
  6. Fry two cutlets at a time. Lower them away from you into the oil — never toward you; hot oil splatter has a direction and it should not be yours. Fry for 4 minutes per side, or until deeply golden. The panko crust should be dry-looking and the color of aged oak, not pale gold. Lift one edge with tongs and check the underside. When it is right, flip once. Do not flip repeatedly.
  7. Drain on a wire rack. Let the cutlets rest for 3 minutes before cutting — this is not optional, the interior is still cooking. Cut each cutlet into 1.5cm strips across the grain, keeping the pieces together so the cutlet holds its shape on the plate.
  8. Serve on steamed rice with the shredded cabbage alongside and the tonkatsu sauce drizzled over the cutlet or in a small dish for dipping. Lemon wedges on the side. The cabbage is there for a reason: its raw bitterness and crunch cut through the richness of the pork and the sweet sauce. Do not skip it or replace it with salad leaves. It is not salad. It is architecture.

Why panko behaves differently — and why it matters

European fine breadcrumbs are made from dried crustless bread that is then ground finely. They compact easily and cling closely to the surface of whatever is being coated, producing a tight, sealed crust. Panko is made by passing an electrical current through dough, which bakes without developing a crust, then drying and shredding the result into irregular flat flakes. These flakes do not compact — they stack loosely, creating an open, porous crust that shatters under a knife and has dramatically more surface area exposed to the hot oil. More surface area means more Maillard reaction happening simultaneously, which means more browning, more flavour, and a crust that stays crisp much longer after it leaves the oil. Pressing tonkatsu into its panko coating means pressing the flakes firmly enough to adhere — not compressing them into a solid mass. The goal is adherence without compression. You will feel the difference: correctly coated panko feels slightly lifted and airy. Over-compressed panko feels dense. Fry them both and you will not need to ask which was which.

The Dutch brought the technique. Japan took it somewhere else entirely.

How to serve this.

The bitterballen come out first — they fry faster and are eaten immediately, standing up, with mustard, while the second batch goes in. The tonkatsu rests while the rice finishes and the cabbage is shredded.

Bitterballen on one end of the table. Tonkatsu, rice, and cabbage on the other. Tonkatsu sauce in a small dish in the center. Mustard beside the bitterballen.

The match is in three hours. Start frying.

Two dishes from the same technique — and one of them took it further.

Bitterballen and tonkatsu are both applications of the same fundamental process: coat a filling in breadcrumbs and fry it in hot oil until the exterior crisps and the interior heats through. The Dutch arrived at bitterballen by applying this technique to their braised ragù tradition. The Japanese arrived at tonkatsu by taking the European Wiener Schnitzel — which itself arrived in Japan through the Dutch trade relationship — and substituting panko for fine breadcrumbs, transforming the crust entirely. What you are tasting in the difference between these two dishes is two cultures' answers to the same cooking principle. The Dutch answer is magnificent. The Japanese answer is the same technique, taken somewhere new.