Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Pounded Chicken with Pepper Jelly Sauce

In some ways, this is my Southern take on Chicken Piccata. It involves chicken breasts that get pounded flat, and a sweet-and-sour sauce that sort of echoes capers, and mostly doesn't. It's awfully tasty, though. The pounded chicken is useful as a tenderizing technique in a number of recipes, so even if the topping throws you off or you don't have a local source of pepper jelly, try the chicken in recipes like chicken Parmesan (add grated Parmesan to the panko breading, and continue per the recipe). This is really versatile and always tasty, so don't be constrained to just this sauce for topping!


Pounded Chicken

3 boneless skinless chicken breasts
2 eggs
1 cup flour
2 cups panko breading
1 tbsp fresh parsley, roughly chopped
 4 tbsp olive oil for oiling the frying pan

Start about five hours before you actually intend to cook the dish. Take each of the three chicken breasts and using a sharp knife, cut in half lengthwise, parallel to the cutting surface. This should result in six thin breast-shaped cutlets: the top and bottom of each breast that's been halved. Wipe the cutting surface, and place a sheet of waxed paper large enough to hold both a top and a bottom cutlet on it. Add one breast (this means two pieces, a top and a bottom) to the waxed paper, and cover both top and bottom cutlets with another sheet of waxed paper. Using a meat-tenderizing hammer, pound the crap out of both cutlets. Really take it to them. The goal is to get them as thin as possible. This should result in one chicken breast becoming two very much thinner cutlets.Once you've done this to each of the chicken breasts (producing 6 cutlets), salt and pepper each cutlet then sit them back in the fridge for a few hours for the chicken to soak in the seasoning.

After several hours of letting the chicken just sit in salt-and-pepper seasoning having elapsed, it's time to actually make the recipe. Get out your friendly electric frying pan, and turn on the heat to somewhere between 350 and 375 degrees and add the 4 tbsp olive oil to prevent things from sticking. Make up three bowls of prep: a bowl of flour, a bowl of egg that's whipped enough to break up the yolks and combine the eggs somewhat homogenously, and a bowl of panko-and-parsley that's mixed by hand. Take your chicken out of the fridge, and dip each cutlet into first the flour until completely coated, then the egg, then the panko. The flour will stick to the raw chicken, the egg will stick to the flour, and the panko will stick to the egg. This produces a coating that will pan-fry to a crispy and satisfying coating. Cook the chicken for 5-7 minutes on each side in the oil at 350 degrees (refreshing the oil as necessary; the oil shouldn't be at all heavy with this one, just enough to keep it from sticking to the pan), and sit it aside on a plate that's lined with paper towels to soak up extra oil.


Pepper Jelly Sauce

3 tbsp butter
1 tbsp flour
1 small sweet onion (SWEET is the key word. Go for your Videlia or your Ming onions here. An ordinary white onion will need to be halved to fit this requirement)
3/4 tbsp fresh ground pepper (1/2 tbsp ground pepper if you can't do it fresh)
1 chile pepper, minced, seeds removed
1/2 cup white cooking wine
1 1/2 cup chicken stock
1/2 cup red pepper jelly (go for a sweet and sour jelly. Nothing too hot, but you want a bit of a kick to it. Too hot will ruin the recipe, so err on the side of sweet here). 


Mince your sweet onion. Add it and the butter to a non-stick saute pan, and saute the onion until it's translucent and melting (about 8 minutes). If you need to, add more butter or olive oil to this stage until there's enough to cover the bottom of your saute pan in a thin layer.

Add the flour to the butter-onion mixture, and whisk until the flour is combined with the butter. Hopefully this will make a moderately thick sauce. You don't want a roux, but you also don't want something so thin that it's just butter. Go for a happy medium (I realize that's not terribly helpful, but this may be one of those things that can only be described by someone who's already made the darn recipe. I hope that 'happy medium between roux and butter sauce' is enough of an explanation to give a good idea).

Once the butter sauce has thickened mildly, add the ground pepper, chile pepper, wine, stock, and pepper jelly. Keep the mixture on medium heat, and stir often. The goal is to get the pepper jelly to melt. This will take about ten minutes, in my experience. Do not add stuff during this time; you want the pepper jelly to be completely melted into the sauce before you start making decisions about what to add to balance what you're tasting.

Once the pepper jelly is completely melted into the sauce (be patient, it may take longer than you think. That's not a bad thing.), taste the sauce. Add salt, pepper, or sugar to taste. If sauce is too thick, add chicken stock. Simmer until sauce is appropriately thick.


Combine:

Serve the breaded chicken and the pepper  jelly sauce separately, so that your diners can add as much or as little sauce as they desire, to suit the level of spiciness that matches their taste. If you use good pepper jelly, it's not uncommon that the sauce here be gone long before the chicken disappears.