Andrew Zimmern Cooks: Chicken Parmesan

This chicken parmesan is my love letter to the Italian-American red sauce classic I grew up eating in NYC. Sure you can gussy it up, but this recipe sticks to the basics—fried chicken topped with an easy homemade tomato sauce, creamy ricotta and mozzarella… melted under the broiler and topped with fresh basil.

Recipe: https://bit.ly/36okriM

An american classic chicken parm well an italian american classic straight from the oven who doesn’t want that for dinner tonight so the first thing that i want to do is set up my flour breadcrumb egg station so i have a few cups of flour i’m going to season it with cayenne pepper

Oregano basil salt and whisk it together while you’re shaking it back and forth to evenly distribute set that over there egg bread crumbs parmesan cheese i’m gonna put about half of this in there i’m putting basil oregano chili in everything except the egg it’s really going to taste yummy and yes

This gets salt too i don’t want my ingredients to go flying everywhere so i’m going to use my hands here so that is all done all we really have to do to get ready is pound out our chicken breasts a little bit of vegetable oil

And i mean a little bit we just want this to coat so that these breasts slide around easier in essence slide across the plastic while i’m pounding them some cooks go absolutely nuts at this point and try to get this giant paper thin sheet of chicken i find

That it gets tough and dryer that way and you can’t fry it in the batter for very long and so with apologies to all the great paper thin you know schnitzel makers of the world i just find it easier to go about a quarter inch thick let the plastic help you

Then i just line these up in the order they go into the fryer flour egg breadcrumb If you pound them out thinner than a quarter of an inch i find they just tend to fall apart and it just detracts from the whole point of the dish by the way a word about sauce i took the sauce that was in my cup measure this is our homemade tomato sauce

And i just heat it up enough so that i can ladle hot sauce onto my chicken parm i have these two parms ready to get spackled my buddy will taught me is that when he makes this dish he puts bechamel as a layer in his chicken parm

So i started to play around with that and when i have bechamel i use it but one day i didn’t have any i already had all my ingredients laid out and dinner was coming but i had ricotta cheese in a nice little eight ounce tub in the back of the

Refrigerator and i used that and you know what i liked it even more let’s get some parm in there now remember this is another opportunity to season pepper and salt am i covering this in sauce yes but i’m going around the perimeter first and then building towards the interior

I want to use enough sauce to cover but i’m not like bathing this in tomato soup right if you have large balls of fresh mozzarella by all means go ahead and use those you can really get great coverage and it melts and you know it does all the mozzarella

Stuff that you wanted to and now all i want to do is slide these underneath the broiler Depending on how high you are from your heating element right i mean i’ve got hot chicken hot sauce mozzarella i’m just gonna put about three four inches away and have my broiler on high now you’ll notice that i don’t like smother in mozzarella cheese because i have that ricotta

Underneath it and i’m putting a i guess now technically a third layer of parm because some is in the breadcrumbs too so this is so cheesy and so beautifully divinely darius at the end of the day the proof is in the pudding right how does it taste

Look at that crispy chicken thin layer of ricotta homemade tomato sauce mozzarella three ways grated parm is worked in here the that saltiness from the farm is just fantastic greatest compliment i can give this i’m cooking this in my adopted home state of minnesota where i’ve lived for 27 years

This reminds me of being home in new york city oh forget about it