Giada's Chicken Cacciatore Recipe

I'm going to start on my chicken cacciatore. And the first thing I want to do is season my 4 chicken breasts and 4 chicken thighs. Some freshly ground black pepper. Cacciatore basically is like cooked in a hunter's style, so it's very rustic. We're going to flip them over and season the other side. I've got chicken breasts here with the bone in and the skin on to make it look more rustic and give it more flavor. And you know, we've all had chicken cacciatore in Italian-American restaurants and a lot of times it tends to be an overly sweet sauce and an overcooked dry piece of chicken. Well this chicken cacciatore recipe will change your mind and make you fall in love with this dish again. Alright, all the sides are seasoned. Let's add some regular olive oil to our sauté pan because we're going to brown them up. Raise our heat to about a medium. You want the pan nice and hot to get it nice and brown on the outside. Now I'm going to coat the chicken in a thin layer of flour. And the flour will help keep the chicken moist and give it a nice brown coating. In Northern Italy they like to make this dish with onions and carrots, celery. In Southern Italy they like to use anchovies, olives, and sometimes chili peppers. So I'm going to brown this side and I'm going to flip them over and brown the other side. And I'm going to get all my ingredients together for my fantastic sauce. Lower my heat just a little bit and I'm going to chop my ingredients. So I need an onion. Just rough chop. This is rustic cooking. You don't have to worry about size or anything else. I'm going to add a little bit more oil so that there's enough oil in the pan to coat the vegetables so they can cook. And I'm going to raise my heat to about a medium and we're going to add our onions. These three ingredients, the onions, the peppers, and the garlic are the flavoring ingredients. At least sort of the base flavors. Garlic. That's a lot of chicken so maybe three. So just a quick little chop. There we go. And into the pan. The onion acts as a bed so that the garlic doesn't burn when you add it to the pan. A little bit of salt. And the peppers. And I'm going to use one big red bell pepper. You could also use green if you wanted to. They're not quite as sweet because the red bell peppers are the ripened version of the green bell peppers. So we're just going to cut our bell peppers and we'll add that to our onions and garlic. Doesn't that look good? A little bit more salt just to release all the moisture and all the juices out of the vegetables and some fresh ground black pepper. I'm going to let this saute a couple of minutes just until the onions are fragrant and the garlic's fragrant and the vegetables start to sort of wilt and the onions will become translucent. I'm going to use a can of chopped tomatoes and I'm using canned tomatoes because they have a lot of juice. A lot more juice than fresh tomatoes have and that's what's going to make this dish luscious. Nice saucy consistency. A can of tomatoes. Some white wine. We're using chicken, lighter, so we're going to use some white wine. Some chicken broth and some dried oregano. And the dried oregano is lemony and it's sort of earthy and it makes this dish rustic and it gives it that rustic taste. And now some capers. I'm using capers that are preserved in white wine vinegar. They kind of give it a tangy taste. It counterbalances the sweetness of the peppers. We'll bring that up to a boil. Just for a minute. I'm ready to add my chicken. We'll put the breasts and the thighs back into the sauce. And the flour from the chicken is going to help thicken the sauce. Alright. I'm going to let this simmer for about 20 minutes until the chicken is all cooked through.