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knife tip through the fat seam every inch, then pounded flat

pork loin chops, with the pale band of sinew where fat meets muscle cut through at intervals along its whole length, then pounded between sheets of plastic to an even half inch and pressed back into a square roughly the footprint of the bread. The scoring is not decorative: that connective tissue contracts far more than muscle does in hot oil, and left intact it pulls the cutlet into a bowl that fries unevenly and will not sit flat in a sandwich. Even thickness is the other half — a cutlet that is three-quarters of an inch at one end and a quarter at the other cannot be cooked correctly at both, so one end is always dry