How I Make A Delicious Easy Weeknight Chicken Dish

Hey, welcome back. Today we're going to make chicken piccata. The family loves this one. It is truly a weeknight dish. It comes together super quickly. Here are all the ingredients. Let's get into it right now. I always like to go over the ingredients. It helps me, but it's more important that I help you. And because this dish comes together so quickly, it's really critical to have everything prepped. Okay, so let's just go over these ingredients. The recipe says one and a half pounds of thin sliced chicken cutlets. I have chicken breasts right here, so we'll just fillet them. We'll slice them in half. And if we need to, we'll pound them out. You're going to season those chicken cutlets with salt and pepper and then dredge them in flour. That'll help get a better crust for them. It'll look better, get it nice and golden. We're going to sear the chicken in a combination of butter and olive oil. I like to use both. Look, you can definitely do it all with this, but just listen to me and do both. That will be the optimal way to do it. Three tablespoons of capers. These capers, I had my assistant who is watching me always over here rinse them and kind of soak them a little bit in water for about 10 minutes. That'll get rid of some of the sodium in capers. Capers are super salty. Could you skip it? You can, but I recommend you do it this way. It's not hard to do. We also have six to eight lemon slices. This dish has lemon in it. It has one cup of low-sodium chicken stock and then a third of a cup of dry white wine. I have Sauvignon Blanc here, but you can use any dry white wine you like. All three of these come together to make a really delicious sauce. We'll also, after we sear that chicken, we'll put some garlic in here because garlic's going to make everything better. And we'll finish with parsley. I have two butter things here. It's six tablespoons of butter total. I have three tablespoons apart. I'll use that for the searing of the chicken. Then the other stuff we'll just zip in the freezer. Then we'll use some of that butter mixed in with a little bit of flour at the end to make our sauce, to emulsify the sauce. Most places, most restaurants will just use a cornstarch slurry. A lot of restaurants will just have a big vat of piccata sauce on the side. When they get an order for chicken piccata, they're like, more piccata sauce on there. Honestly, it's not that good. It's really not. Now, high-end restaurants aren't going to do that. I hope they wouldn't. I think you're better off following this way than the cornstarch way. If you really want that gloopy, thick cornstarch sauce, feel free to do it. All right, let's get into fileting the chicken right now. Chicken, we're going to filet it. We'll slice it in half. We're going to take a filet from it. Not going to butterfly it. Butterfly it means we would open it up and keep it together. You could do that if you want a really big piece of piccata. Sharpen your knife. You need a sharp knife here so you can cut it very easily. I'm just going to hone my knife very quickly. Listen, here's deal. You can tell if your knife is sharp with a piece of paper or against your nail. People, you guys, this is something you get upset. You shouldn't show people to do that. Well, it's going to tell you exactly how to do it like this. It's going to stop on a dime. You can shave your hair if you want, but you don't want to do that. Then every time I do it, a lot of ambulance people, they're like, oh, you might be moving metal chips on your board. Look, wipe it off then. I got to show you here because this is where the camera is. I can't be over here with it, but do that. Honestly, we're not even going to do it on this board anyway because I don't want to get my board wet with chicken juice. I'm just going to use this because then I can put this right into the dishwasher. The chicken, they're always wet. Dry it off. Dry them all off. It'll make it easier so it doesn't slip out of your hand when you're doing it. I'm just going to go right through here like this, right through there. Just take your knife and listen, you would be closer here to your edge, but I'm just doing this here so you can see it. Look, your knife is sharp, so it'll go right through it, just like that. Now we have two pieces of chicken. This is perfect for our piccata. What you can do is because the breast will always be high on one side, thin on the other, you can just take a bit of plastic wrap and then pound it to get it relatively flat. Why do we do that? So that the entire thing cooks at the same rate. That's right. It's important to do this, so you would always do this. If you don't, it will never be cooked at the same rate, ever. It's impossible. I realize there's a lot of you who are like, Jim, I know that. You're telling me something I already know, but there's a lot of you who don't know it. The best way to do it is plastic on the top and bottom, and ideally on your wooden cutting board because you get much better feedback. The plastic thing, it's just going to start bouncing around. This thing is awesome, by the way. The one I had before was horrible. It was like magnesium, so it was chipping. I was like, I got to get rid of that. All right, look, just a little bit. Oh man, forget that. Eating my words, impossible. Okay, just a little bit there. Now if you want ultimate equal cooking, this little edge here you can cut off, but we'll leave it. All right, and this is it. All right, we're not going crazy here. If you have been watching this channel for a long time, you will know that I made a chicken piccata video about five or six years ago when I first started. The audio is horrible. I have a ponytail. I look ridiculous, or for some of you, I might look awesome. I don't know. It was time to redo it, but anyway, in that video, I used, they were called ultra thin chicken cutlets that places here in Long Island serve it because these places are serving the Italian American community that is obsessed with a super thin chicken cutlet, and I used them in the video and it was just too thin. Okay, so you don't want them that thin. You want them like that. All right, that's perfect. So this is going to work really well. Okay, same everywhere, and just do it for the other two or just buy thin cutlets. Here's our chicken. This was three breasts, so now we have six pieces. I have flour. This is a half a cup of that flour, all-purpose flour. We're going to dredge, but also just save this flour. We'll use it at the end to thicken up our sauce. Now, listen, you can season your flour. I would season it heavily if you want, but it's better off just salting and peppering the chicken first. Then you know exactly the amount you're putting on there, and then you do your dredge. It's just a simpler way. It's a more accurate way because we want to be super accurate when we put our salt on. Is that sarcasm? Yes, I'm just seasoning with salt and pepper on both sides. Not everybody knows if you're being sarcastic or not. That didn't seem sarcastic. Well, I know it because I know you. Okay, and listen, this is another thing too. I mean, the salt and pepper, often in recipes I don't write. You'll see recipes written, they'll be like, use a half a teaspoon. It's just, it's not the way. It's just not. Okay, like full stop on that. It's not. Some people just cannot have salt. So it's just where they want a little bit. Just put a little bit. All right, it's not going to tell you the exact amount of salt to put on your chicken here. You know what you like. So you can take another piece of paper because the chicken will just continue to just get wet. So you could just do that. And then salt and pepper on the other side. Okay, so here's our flour. Remember, like I said, save it after you dredge it and just do a parchment paper lined baking sheet like this. You could put the flour in a plastic bag if you like, you know, and honestly, I've been doing that on like, I'll do it for like, when I have a lot of small pieces, but for this, this is fine. Okay, now look, just go like this, little pat. So we don't, you know, we don't want a thick layer on it. Okay, that's it. Just like that. And then just lay it down and then go like this to get your flour back everywhere. Parchment paper is going to stop. Like you'll, you'll be able to set up for a while this way versus if you like you had it on like a regular plate, it would all get sticky really quickly. Dredging, this is going to allow it to get a little bit better color and it's also going to give a little bit more thickness to our sauce. All right, let's repeat for the remaining four pieces. So look, I'm going to use a 12 inch pan. This pan works well. It's hard anodized. Use a stainless if you want, that would be fine. I'm going to heat this up to a touch less than medium heat. Medium, the butter might burn a little bit, like a 4.6 out of 10. 4.65. Yeah. You know, I mean, look, I'm, I just, but you need to, you need to learn how to control the temperature on your stove. You do. This will, that will make you a much better cook. All right. I'm just going to let this heat up for a second. We're going to put oil in first and then we'll put in our butter. It's better that way. So your butter doesn't burn. So just like one tablespoon of olive oil. I'm just using regular olive oil here. Yeah. Maybe a touch more. That's why I wiped down the oil to put more oil back down. Kind of like how, when we do like chicken franchise, you're doing both. All right. So put the chicken down and do not crowd your pan. You might have to do three batches depending on, you know, how you caught them, how big the chicken, I can probably, I can fit three. So I'll be able to do it in two batches, which is what I was going for. So again, regulate your heat. If you feel like, you know, if you're too low and things aren't burning, make it a little bit higher. And then what I like to do is as I'm doing it, I'll just add more butter in and I will rotate the chicken. That's what you're going to have to do because the inside here is going to be hotter and then the outside. I've stopped using cast iron a lot for these dishes and for really, for anything, because it's honestly, it's a poor, I was, you know, I used to just like recite conventional wisdom saying it's like a good heat distributor. It's not, it's like super hot in the middle, barely on the outside versus a pan like this will stay relatively hot on all sides. Okay. Stainless works well too. And my pan was a little too, not hot enough. So I, I'm probably like at like a five and a half out of 10, I would say. And I've just been rotating them. Um, you can see how much they shrink as the heat comes to them. They were a lot bigger when we started, right? They've probably been going for about two, two and a half minutes, do about three to four minutes per side. That should be good at about this level of heat. Then about three minutes. Okay. So like that. Yeah. Nice. That looks all right. He's probably took five minutes tall and might have my, my heat might be a little too much. Um, it's fine. Okay. Just, uh, something like this. You don't have to drain these, just grab them. All right. My other side is not as Brown, but I want to get them out because what I did was just touch them. And if they're very close is we're going to put them back in the sauce to finish them. You could just put Same thing. You got a lot of fat in oil in here. You don't really need much more. We'll put more butter in, but I don't think we're going to add more, uh, oil and I'll just grab some more butter like that. Maybe like that and like that. And what I've also been doing is I've just been rotating my pan again. This is more because I'm cooking on this portable burner. It basically, if you could learn to cook on a portable burner like this, you'll be infinitely better cooking on a real stove because the heating element is larger. Okay. I've rotate here often because part of the pan is not as hot as the other, other side. Okay. So this whole frying process here, maybe, maybe 15 minutes total, but it was like about six minutes per batch. All right. So we'll just pull these out. That's the chicken. Yeah. It looks good. Right? Beautiful. All right. Just tent it over there. Their pan. Everything here is fine. You're going to have some leftover fat from the chicken butter and oil, which is what you want. Turn the heat off for a second. Okay. Just turn it off. Add your garlic in. Now I'm going to turn the heat back on to very low. Okay. About three out of 10. Just want to get this garlic a little golden in here, but we don't want to burn it. And this is only going to take about a minute, a minute or two. So the whole dish now at this point, like you have your chicken seared, like the whole thing is like, you can call your family down to, to eat because it's going to, they could sit there and wait because the sauce takes just a few minutes now. If you want it to prep this ahead, you could just like sear the chicken the night before. Yeah, pretty much. And then when you can make the whole thing ahead, this is what catering places do all the time. You know, they make extra sauce, corn starch. Yeah. You know, it's like, everything's in like a big pool of, of sauce. Yeah. Okay. So this is like, that's golden. That's all I'm looking for there. Here's the capers. Okay. And just like a minute on those capers. Okay. If you look like your garlic's getting too golden, which that is a little bit, I'm just going to lift it off the heat. Okay. I can just turn that off for a second or I could bring it off somewhere else. Let's get the wine and the chicken stock in. So we need a third of a cup of wine or, you know, about that much. Okay. Not, you don't need that much. Okay. Now turn the heat up to high. This is one cup of the chicken stock. Okay. I'm just using better than bouillon chicken base. Let's just bring this up to high. We're going to reduce this a little bit, thicken it up a tiny bit, but most of the thickening will happen when we put our butter and flour in. Boil this for about two minutes straight. And with your wooden spoon, you can, you know, especially if you're using a stainless pan, you'd have more brown bits at the bottom of the pan. So just dislodge anything. And then, yeah, just let this cook for about two minutes. This is the cold butter. Now this is butter that was in the fridge. And then this is the remaining flour that we had from before. Just stick the butter in the flour, just coat it. And then we'll just use these as much as we need to get the sauce to the consistency we like. Let that keep going for about one more minute. Okay. So that's been about two minutes. Consistency of the sauce. It's reduced a little bit. Okay. It's like this. Just turn the heat to low. Lemon wedges. I'm going to put in a few right now. You could save more for later. If you put a bit now, the lemon will get a little bit like cooked and, you know, it won't look as nice. You'll often see pictures where the lemons are like, you know, they're brand new. So, you know, choice is yours. I'll leave a couple for later. This lemon goes in here and it gives it, you know, more of a lemon tang. We'll let this simmer for a couple minutes. And then, you know, if needed, you can just serve more lemons on the side or you can increase the amount of lemon juice at the end. You gotta be careful, though. You can ruin the whole dish if you add too much lemon. Like, you will. There's a lot of tang in here and acid already between the white wine and the capers. It's been a couple minutes here. I'm just going to take in like one or two of these little tiny cubes at a time that have just been with the flour and then just whisk it in here. Now, what's going to happen is like, you know, you can do this further at the end. You can put your chicken in like last because you want, you know, you put it in the cold butter into the hot liquid to try to get it to emulsify so it doesn't break. But I just do it this way here and I get the chicken in and I pour it all together and then we eat. So, you can see that's the beginning of it. Okay, that piece, there's no more butter in there. We'll put another one in. We'll just keep doing it. And what that's going to do is it's just going to thicken the sauce ever so slightly. Rich in the sauce for sure. Because right now, without that, it's like kind of like liquidy and needs some viscosity in it. And when you put the chicken back in that was coated in flour, that will absorb some of the sauce too. Didn't you make a chicken piccata pasta dish? I did. Video for it? I did. And that's, that was nice because we used the pieces of chicken. So, like each chicken piece, I think it was chicken thighs I used, they were coated in like the flour and we needed a lot of extra sauce because it was, you know, the pasta absorbs a ton of it. I remember that being really good. A lot of people like, you know, especially in America, like chicken piccata is served over pasta. Yeah. Like it's always served over like capellini or angel hair and that's definitely not the case in Italy. This is the thing, this is what I tell you, like do this to how you like it. See how much butter I have left there? And also it's going to be kind of a function of how much you used when you were, when you did your sear, but you don't have to use it all. Do this exactly how you like it. You can taste this each time you add another cube and the flour, you get it right where you like it. Then you could just, you know, you could call it quits at that point. I'm not going to need to use all this. Definitely not. Okay. Just one more. Okay. I have like six more little cubes left. So I probably have like a tablespoon and a half left. I like it like a little on the thinner side. I don't like the gloopy cornstarch one. You know, I do associate that with like not so good restaurants. Like I don't think you should have a batch of piccata sauce ready for when you get an order of piccata, just like you shouldn't have a batch of any sauce really ready. Like, except for like a ragu or something that takes hours to make. So look, here's our sauce right now. Okay. See like this. So the richness is like that. Now let's give it a taste and season it. Really good. Does not need any salt. Going to put some nice pepper on it. You know, after we get the sauce tasting how we like, we'll add our chicken back just for a couple of minutes with all those juices too. Okay. So get those juices in there. I have the, the flame right now on very low. Okay. I want to, I want to be able to warm all this through. So just keep coating everything here. Just turn these chicken pieces over. Okay. And we're just going to let this simmer a little bit until our chicken is completely hot through. And then we'll be ready to go. I forgot the parsley. Okay. I'm going to put on about that much right now. Let this just continue to like simmer and get all delicious together. So the taste tester is an hour or an hour or even longer from getting home. It's an hour and 20 minutes. He's an hour and 20 minutes. We're going to have him taste test it, but remember it'll be an hour and 20 minutes later. I know you're saying, Jim, you're, you're already setting it up. Well, I'm going to taste test it myself right now and I'll be harsh on it. Listen, if you want more sauce here, just double the liquid ingredients. It's all you have to do. You could triple the liquid ingredients if you want to serve it with pasta. The only thing I recommend you do at the end, like I said, is check your acid levels, your lemon juice. You can always add more to it, but you can't take it away. So don't be in a rush to like, just, you know, toss it on there. All right. Let's see how this is. What does it need? Um, to be honest with you, it may be a touch more salt. We'll see what the taste tester says. Yeah. That's another thing. You want to make sure you don't incinerate it in the beginning, but at the same time, you cook it enough because you're only going to put in the sauce for a couple more minutes at the end. We'll see what the taste tester thinks. And, uh, for you, it'll be like a minute. For me, it'll be an hour and 20. James, you just had roast beef five minutes ago. Now you're having chicken piccata that's been sitting here for two hours. Still be good. Yeah. You can see the sauce has broke now because I just heated it up in the microwave. I always like chicken piccata. So it's a big bite. It's really good. It's like lemon and chicken. I don't know who came up with it, but a really good combo. You've eaten this dish a lot in your life. So you've had. It's just that there's not much to comment about chicken piccata. It's like most people who like cook, they know what it is. It's chicken with lemon capers and garlic. It's just like good. It's like, it's not like anything like crazy. There's not much to say about it. It's really not done differently. It's solid. Like some places will put artichoke hearts in it. Some will do mushrooms. But for the most part, it's normally pretty much always like this. I think it's more about like execution. Like, did you get your chicken thin? Like, if you used a fat piece of chicken, you might have a problem. If you missed your sear on your chicken, which, you know, would be like an amateur mistake, stuff like that. You know, like if you have gray chicken instead. Those are things that I think would make it not as good. Yeah. Usually I'll give it a 10 out of 10 with the new like ratings that I'm doing. I'm going to give it a nine. It's solid. It's like, nine is like solid. I think nine is better than solid. The way you're describing it now. I mean, actually, I feel like seven is solid. Yeah. So this is better than solid. Yeah. You know what? Maybe you should make chicken piccata one day and then we can see, maybe you'll have a different feeling of the dish. You might think then, oh, you know what? It's harder than I thought. Yeah. It's like, so like basic and everybody knows it, but just because- It's basic to you. It's not basic to many other people. Just because it's basic doesn't mean it's not good. It's like pasta with red sauce. It's like the best thing ever. And it's basic. Yeah. That's going to be, when he does a video, when he cooks for me, I have a feeling the first dish he's going to make is going to be pasta with red sauce. Right, James? He's already made it before and he makes it pretty well. Extra garlic. All right, James, we appreciate the nine. Thank you very much. And we will see you next time. Can I just finish this cutlet and then I'm going to eat it. Of course. People want to know that you're going to finish it, like that you're going to take it off with you. That lets them know that you thought it was good.