Chicken Saltimbocca | Food Wishes

This amazing Italian classic is traditionally made with veal, but chicken breast is a great substitute, and regardless of what meat you use, the one-two punch of fresh sage leaves and pan-fried prosciutto creates a dish that truly lives up to its name. Just in case you didn’t know, “saltimbocca” means, ”jumps in the mouth,” and it really does. Enjoy!

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[Music] hello this is Chef John from foodwishes.com with chicken Salt and bokeh that’s right we used to make this amazing dish with ve but then we made a deal with the baby cows to only eat their tougher older relatives but beef is not a great choice here so these days we use pork instead or how we’re going to do it in this video with chicken breast which might be my favorite way to go and to get started we’re going to want to pound our chicken breast out nice and flat and for that I like to cut open a zip top bag which I just find a lot easier than plastic wrap but of course you’re not going to be able to use the bag again and the plastic wrap is cheaper so you’ll have to decide I mean you are after all the BOS gags of was in bags but either way we’ll place a boneless skinless chicken breast down with a smooth side up and we’ll use one of these meat pounding mallets or really anything heavy and flat and we’ll pound our chicken breast out somewhere between a qu in and a half in thick which I believe if we do the math is 38 of an inch and once we’ve done that to two breasts we’ll go ahead and season this up with a little bit of salt and some freshly ground black pepper and we really don’t want to put too much here just a light sprinkling and you’re probably thinking aren’t you the guy that tells us to generously season things well that is true but because we’re going to pan frry this with Puro attached which tends to be pretty salty we want to be careful with how much we put on at this point so we will season that lightly on both sides and then we’ll turn that back over so the smooth sides faing up at which point it’s time to apply our Sage leaves and regarding that we’re going to have two major decisions to make one would be how much to put okay you could go with as little as one leaf or like I’m going to do three or four leaves for almost total coverage and then the second big decision would be whether to put the sage down first and then put our paraham over the top or layer pruto down first and then put our Sage leaves on top of that and as you can see I’m a sage first kind of guy and as we move forward I will explain the differences in the final product but anyway once I’ve applied my sage I’m going to go ahead and cover that with one thin slice of peruto and if that’s big enough to cover everything then great that’s all we need but usually I’ll take another slice and tear off some additional pieces and use that on spots that need a little more coverage and what I like about this method is it once this is frying in the pan that Sage gets cooked between the chicken and the ham and I find the flavor permeates everything a lot better and more intensely okay if you use the other method where you put the ham down first and then the sage on top what’s going to happen is that Sage Leaf’s going to fry kind of crisp which I will admit looks cool but when you fry Sage crisp you do lose a lot of the flavor so if you’ve never done this before you might have to try it both ways and see which one you like more but either way once the sage and ham have been applied we’ll cover this with a piece of plastic wrap and give everything a nice firm pressing down and then if possible I like to pop this in the fridge for about a half hour just so everything’s nice and cold and firm when it hits the pan but that is optional and if you’re starving just go ahead and cook it up now and to do that we’ll heat up some olive oil in a pan set over medium high heat and we will carefully place our chicken breast in pruto side down and what we’ll do is let this sear for about 3 minutes before we go ahead and turn it over and because that pjo is so thin and fairly fatty our Sage leaves are kind of frying underneath the surface which as I mentioned really does permeate the chicken with a lot of flavor and as great as this is eventually going to taste the aroma you’re going to get in your kitchen when you do this is just beyond amazing okay it really is one of the best things you’ll ever smell and then once we have that turned over we’ll give the other side two or three minutes or until our chicken is safely cooked through and I guess you could try to use a thermometer but the meat is so thin that’s going to be kind of challenging so I usually just give it the old Poca POA to see how it feels since undercooked chicken feels kind of soft and mushy whereas chicken that’s just cooked through will spring back to the touch so I gave mine a test and it was feeling just about perfect and once it does we’ll turn off the heat and we’ll remove that chicken to a plate and Loosely cover it with foil while we move on to an optional but absolutely amazing pan sauce which will we’ll do by adding a small splash of Marsala wine to our pan along with a juice of half a lemon and we’ll turn our heat back on to medium high and also toss in a nice splash of chicken broth and then what we’ll do is cook all this for a few minutes or until our liquid reduces by about half okay we could reduce it more but I really don’t want an overly thick Rich sauce all right this is a fairly decadent dish so I tend to keep the texture of the sauce on the lighter side oh by the way if you don’t have Marcela you could just use a splash of white wine or no wine but the Marcela does give it a nice little subtle hint of sweetness which I think pairs perfectly with the other ingredients but anyway like I said we’ll reduce that by about half at which point we reduce our heat to the lowest setting and if we have some which we will we’ll pour any accumulated juices from the plate back into the pan and then to finish this sauce we’ll simply add a couple chunks of cold butter and then stir and or swirl the pan until the butter disappears years and like I said this is optional many versions of salt and bokeh are just served as is with just the pan dripping spooned over with maybe some fresh lemon on the side but I really do think a simple sauce like this which only takes a couple minutes really does elevate everything it makes for a much more luxurious experience and that’s it once our sauce is set we can go ahead and pull that off the heat and we will serve up our chicken Salt and bokeh ideally next to some cold crisp acidic salad and and we’ll go ahead and spoon over a very generous amount of our sauce right not only do we want plenty to swipe our bites of chicken in but it’s also vantastic soaked up with some nice crusty bread which I had none of which made me a special kind of sad all right there’s regular sad and then there’s not having any bread for something like this sad but anyway I finished up with some fresh lemon and after squeezing a little bit of that on I grabbed a fork knife and went in for a taste and that my friends is the name clearly states jumps in your mouth oh yeah that’s what salt and bokeh translates to and it’s actually a law when you do a salt and bokeh video that you must tell people what it means and for such a simple dish that’s so fast and easy to put together that only involves a couple ingredients we produce something that’s very very complex and just Next Level flavorful I mean if we’re being honest boneless skinless chicken breasts are not the most exciting thing to work with but by simply adding a few leaves of sage and a little bit of that salty super Savory hem and then searing it in the pan as shown we end up with something I think we could describe is very very exciting and that is true even if you don’t make the pan sauce but as you saw that was super fast and easy to do so why wouldn’t you do that also and if you do seriously have some bread around although I am doing a good job of getting as much of that off the plate as I can with the chicken and know that is not just a prop salad some sliced radish and bitter greens like arugula dressed with something acidic like lemon juice or vinegar is a perfect pallet refresher in between bites and that combination is so incredible I didn’t even miss not having any carbs allegedly but whether you do the pant sauce or not or whether you serve this sand starch salt and boka no matter what meat you use is one of the world’s most delicious things to eat which is why I really do hope you give this a try soon so please follow the links below for the ingredient amounts a printable written recipe and much more info as usual and as always enjoy