onight on Dad’s Cook Dinner, we’re making Chicken Piccata with Linguine — a bright, tangy, and flavorful Italian classic that’s perfect for a weeknight dinner or a special family meal. Tender chicken cutlets are lightly breaded, pan-seared, and finished with a luscious lemon, caper, butter, and white wine sauce. Toss it all with linguine for a hearty, restaurant-quality dinner at home.
Ingredients & Costs (Serves 6–8):
3 lbs chicken breasts (butterflied & pounded thin) – $12.00
1 cup all-purpose flour (for dredging) – $0.50
1 medium red onion, finely diced – $1.00
2 tablespoons capers – $2.50
2 lemons, juiced (about 4–5 tbsp) – $1.50
1 cup dry white wine – $2.50
1 cup chicken stock – $1.00
3 tablespoons olive oil – $0.75
3 tablespoons unsalted butter – $0.50
2 tablespoons fresh parsley, chopped – $0.75
1 lb linguine – $2.00
Total: – $25.00 (Feeds 6–8 people!)
This meal comes together in under 40 minutes and tastes like something you’d order in an Italian restaurant — but for a fraction of the cost!
Perfect with: A simple green salad and crusty bread.
Watch now to see how to make this easy, crowd-pleasing dinner that your whole family will love.
#ChickenPiccata #DadsCookDinner #FamilyMeals #EasyRecipes #ItalianDinner
Today we’ve got chicken picata. My family loves this dish. We got a friend over. We’re feeding eight people today for 25 bucks. Stick around and find out how to make the best lemony chicken dish your family’s ever had. All right, let’s start with the ingredients. I put them all up on the screen here, but I’m also going to put them in the description of the video. Not a lot of special stuff here. You might have to go out and get capers. Obviously, the chicken breast, but everything else you have here should probably be out of the pantry or the garden if you got a little herb garden going. I’m going to try and link the chicken stock recipe. This is a great opportunity to use the chicken stock if you guys have seen that video. If not, check it out. So, here I just bought regular chicken breast from the grocery store. I’m cutting these into thinner cutlets. Getting about three per breast. You can buy them already cut, but it’s a little bit cheaper if you just get the regular chicken breast. So, I don’t take I don’t mind taking the time to take this extra step and cutting them thin. I prefer them a little bit thinner when I do this. I think it also stretches them out a little bit, especially if I have a big family, little kids. We made chicken cutlets in episode 3. This is very similar preparation to that. I’m also just going to salt these on both side with kosher salt at this point and let them sit for a little bit. Let that salt do its thing. While that chicken sits, I’m going to set up a dredging station here. Just getting a a bowl with some decent sides on it and filling it up with some flour. I’m using bread flour here. Allpurpose flour would work well, too. This is just all we had. So, unlike the chicken cutlet video where we did flour, egg, and breadcrumb, we’re fully breadcrumbs preparation in that video. We’re just doing flour here. This is going to help thicken the sauce. It’s going to help get the chicken nice and brown um as we move forward here. So, just flour, salt and pepper the flour, get it ready, and get another pan here so you can start dredging your cutlets. This is pretty straightforward, so I’m going to speed up through this part. [Music] This dish comes together really quick once you get going from here forward. So, I suggest you just uh dice and and prep everything in the ingredients list before you start making the sauce. I’ve got a bunch of videos showing you how to do this. So, if you need some pointers, check those out. [Music] All right, I’ve got a big pan here over mediumigh heat. I let the pan come up to temp. Then I put in some olive oil. You can see I pretty much coated the bottom. There’s a decent amount in there. And now I’m putting about four or five pads of butter in the pan and letting that come up to temp, bubble, get incorporated. This is what we’re going to sauté the chicken in. It’s going to impart a bunch of flavor. It’s also going to create a bunch of nice fond and flavor at the bottom of the pan. So, don’t skip this step. I really suggest if you’re going to skip anything, maybe eliminate the olive oil and just do it in butter. If you do that though, you got to keep an eye on the butter and make sure it doesn’t burn. So, at least a splash of some type of oil in there to protect the butter. Once the butter and oil gets up to temp, we’re going to start browning the chicken. We’re looking for color here. We’re not crazy about temp because we’re going to put the chicken back into the pan once the sauce gets made to cook for a little bit. So, if it’s a little bit under, that’s fine. If you’re nervous and you want to just go and cook it full way through, get it to 165. 160 probably if you’re if you want to do it correctly. And take it out. Then, it’s going to continue to cook even as it sits on that wire rack. So, 160 is a good target temp. 165 is fully cooked. Uh, but like I said, if you get it to 160, it’s going to carry over cooking as it sits. Do this in batches. Don’t overcrowd your pan. And it’s just going to bring the pan temp down. Take your time and and move through this. Really try and get a nice little golden brown color on these. [Music] All right, now it’s time to start making the sauce. We’ve finished browning our chicken and drained off that excess butter and oil. Now we’re putting the pan back on the stove and hitting it with some fresh oil. Notice I didn’t wipe the pan out with anything. All those little brown bits on the bottom are a ton of flavor. So that’s good. We want to hold that for later. Got the pan back over a medium heat here. And going in with our onions. Start to soften these up. We don’t want a lot of heat here. Watch your pan. It’s been doing a lot of cooking. There’s a lot of residual heat in the pan. So, if it needs to cool down, either slide it off or add some more oil to cool the pan down. Don’t want to burn these or brown them even for that matter. Just want to get them soft and translucent. Next in, I’m going on top with the garlic. You don’t want to lead with the garlic here because it’ll burn. Also going in with the capers and giving the pan a good splash of white wine. This is going to delaze the bottom of the pan. Once you cook off the white wine, the alcohol from the white wine, I’m going in with some chicken stock. I’m going to try and link our chicken stock video we did a couple weeks back, either here in the video or in the description. Check that out. It worked perfectly in this recipe. And I’m also going in with the fresh squeeze lemon juice. Once everything’s in, bring it up to a nice simmer. We want to reduce this by about half and start to give the sauce a little body and consistency. I also like to go back in with the chicken at this point. Since it’s freshly cooked and just coming off, it’s going to do a couple things. I like to cook my chicken a little under and finish it here in the pan, but it’s also going to soak up a lot of the flavors and stuff in the dish. I think it pulls everything together really nicely. Just make sure when you’re putting the chicken back in, you also put the resting juices that are in your pan. Those resting juices are like a chicken bullion cube on steroids. Don’t let it go to waste. Now, let that chicken blip away for like five to 10 minutes. This is where I would temp it. Make sure it’s up to temp. Also, offscreen, I didn’t do it on camera, but I did some linguini here. So, this is a pound of linguini. I hit it with a little olive oil, some butter, and some salt. Take that linguini at the end and serve it with a couple pieces of picata over the top of it and that awesome sauce. It’s going to be epic. Now that that chicken’s had a chance to finish in the sauce, we’re going to take it out of the sauce. I’m putting it here on the serving platter I’m going to use. It’s just a big platter that we use for just about everything. You guys have seen this in a couple videos now. And we’re going to keep the sauce going. We’re going to finish it here and show you guys how to finish this and make it nice and thick and creamy just like it would be if you got it in a restaurant. So, I’ve turned the burner completely to off. The sauce is cooked. Everything’s good to go. Threw a couple pads of butter in here that you can see. And I’m just swirling it around. We want the residual heat of that pan to emulsify this butter and gently incorporate it into the sauce. If we had this ripping hot over an open flame, that butter would break and it would get kind of gnarly in there. You want to take this nice and slow at this point and really slowly incorporate that butter into the into the sauce. This is what it’s going to make it nice and creamy and restaurant quality. This is really going to be the difference maker for this dish. So, take your time here. This is also where you want to taste your dish. Even if you follow the recipe, everything comes out a little bit differently depending on the quality of the ingredients that you put in. So, taste your dish here for salt. Now, we’re going to move to plating, which is super simple at this point. I like to serve the linguini in its own dish and then have all that chicken picata on a nice big platter. So, you’ll see me move it into frame here. Just going to label over the sauce. I like to serve it with some lemon wedges and some flat leaf parsley. It’s how I finish a lot of dishes. It’s a little bit of a touch, but you spent a lot of time making this dish. You want to really have that wow factor when it gets to the table. So, take the extra step and make it look pretty. [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]
Dining and Cooking