How to Make Lemony Chicken Piccata

[Music] in essence Chicken Picatta is simply chicken that's dredged in Flour cooked and then served with a bright lemony caper sauce it's a very simple recipe and that's where things can go wrong quickly but luckily Keith's here and he's gonna show us how to make piccata the right way yeah with simple recipes there's no place to hide imperfections and flaws so we're really going to start right from the bottom here and make the perfect piccata and that's gonna start with our chicken breast okay we have a really great way of making cutlets what we do is we cut it in half vertically like this and you take that thin piece off that's one cutlet and now you can take the thicker cutlet and cut that in half horizontally so now we have three evenly sized evenly thick covets so we're just to make sure that these are perfectly even we're just gonna do a quick pound into a half inch you want to let the meat pounder do the work you don't want to smash it okay those are perfectly a half an inch I measured it with my eye so another problem that we have with chicken breasts is that they are lean and really bland so what we're gonna do is we're gonna put this in here with the remainder of our cutlets and we're working with four six two eight ounce chicken breasts today okay before we go into cooking these we're gonna season them with two teaspoons of kosher salt and that's gonna season the chicken breasts throughout and help them stay moist when we cook them later on I'm also gonna season with our pepper right now - we have 1/2 teaspoon of pepper and what the salt is doing is it's changing the structure of the protein in the chicken right now that protein strands are all going in one direction but the salt is gonna change things up a little bit and create more of a web so it's gonna hold on to moisture better ok it's been 15 minutes and the salt is done it's magic with the chicken breast it's gonna be super moist when we cook it but first we're gonna dredge this in a little bit of flour this is a traditional method for most chicken piccata and the flours gonna help protect this chicken when it's in the skillet and it's gonna help it brown - in this going we're only gonna be in the skillet for a matter of 2 or 3 minutes so it really does need to Brown quickly so we just want to really really light coating here we don't want a heavy coating of flour so I put it in the flour toss it around and then you can just Pat the any excess flour off it's the step that you don't want to skip if you were to leave these cutlets unflavored not only would they take longer to brown but really those edges just get leathery and dry now we have a 12-inch skillet over there with two tablespoons of vegetable oil over medium-high heat I can see little wisps of smoke coming off there and I think it's time to cook half of our chicken breasts we're gonna do this in two batches so I'll just lay that in there you always want to lay chicken cutlets in the pan away from you not towards you hot oil on your feet or on your hands is not fun okay so that's in there you've got a lot of nice space around there those are gonna cook really quickly so two to three minutes for that side and then we'll flip it over and go another two to three minutes and tell them a nice golden-brown while those are cooking we're gonna focus on the lemon in our sauce a lot of recipes just use straight lemon juice which is really really boring it's just bright and that's all you get you have no complexity but today we're actually gonna use the whole lemon so I'm gonna take half of this I cut it this way in half now what we're providing here is that we have the zest of course that's what makes lemons smell really good of those aromatic compounds in the zest we also have the juice which is gonna be citric acid which is gonna provide us a lot of Tang eNOS but what we really liked was the pit this white part right here and normally we don't want that because it's a little bit bitter but that's gonna be actually perfect for our piccata it's gonna give us a really well-rounded flavor and it's gonna balance out the citric acid and their aromatics from that zest I'm just gonna thinly slice this these whole slices are gonna go into our sauce with that now a bowl here okay so let's go check on our chicken and see how this is going oh yeah nicely brown golden color so we're just gonna cook the second side two to three minutes we'll take those out we'll heat another two tablespoons of vegetable oil and cook our second batch okay so our second batch of chicken is done we've cooked this in two tablespoons of vegetable oil for two to three minutes a side beautiful brown now we can start building our sauce and we have some lovely fond in our skillet that we're gonna use to flavor our sauce so I have a teaspoon of vegetable oil and I have one minced shallot this is gonna give our sauce a nice aromatic backbone I'm just gonna cook this and tell it soften they want to make sure that I'm getting up all those little brown bits okay our shallots are softened and I just have one last addition four aromatics I have a clove of garlic and now I have a cup of chicken broth that last addition will help to get any Fond that we have on the bottom I have three tablespoons of fresh lemon juice now our lemon slices that we cut up earlier and that's going to extract all those flavors from the pith the zest and from the juice inside okay this is at a simmer and now most chicken piccata recipes would stop here but we're gonna do something a little different we're gonna put our cutlets back into our sauce now what's gonna happen is that that flour on the chicken is gonna thicken our sauce but also the sauce is gonna kind of rinse off any excess flour from the chicken cutlets so it's not gummy so we're gonna have kind of a perfect harmony between the two that's a huge deviation from the classic usually you cook the chicken cutlets all the way through you put them to the side they're getting cold while the sauce is being made and you had the sauce you pour it over the chicken and you hope for the best yeah so now we're just gonna let this simmer in here really gently it's okay if we cook the cutlets in here a little bit longer they've already probably been cooked through in that initial sear that salt will make sure that the cup would stay nice and juicy okay it's been four minutes and you can see that the sauce is nicely thickened well coated and so we're just gonna transfer the Cutlass to a platter and we can finish our sauce okay so our sauce should be about the texture of heavy cream I think that's probably perfect a nice thick consistency that flour has done its job and thickened our sauce beautiful I'm just gonna turn the heat off and I'm going to whisk in three tablespoons of butter off the heat so it doesn't break I want to make sure that emulsifies the sauce and that butter is just gonna add richness to the sauce we have a lot of bright flavors from the lemon to temper that with a little bit of polar pottery okay so our three tablespoons of unsalted butter has melted and emulsified in there nicely we have a nice smooth rich sauce and now for my favorite part two tablespoons of capers the capers are gonna add a nice briny hit to the sauce in one tablespoon of chopped parsley parsley is just gonna brighten it up and add a little bit of freshness so I'm sturluson just want to give it a quick taste I'm gonna add just a touch of salt to this stir that in I think we are good to go I'm just gonna take this spoon it over our chicken compass really glad see that you did not strain out those one in peace no that's the star of this sauce we don't want to take those out okay I'm gonna give you two cutlets and you can see how those lemon slices have broken down and given up all their flavor to the sauce it's gonna be really really great a little extra sauce for our plates we don't want to skimp on the sauce here I'm gonna say something I never say about boneless skinless chicken breast cutlets juicy in moist tender yeah it's not dried out yeah and when you get a bite of that lemon slice it's perfect you have the bright hit of acidity but you also have a little bit of balance in there with the bitterness from the pith this is absolute excellence Cape perfection and piccata perfection perfect peas well if you'd like perfection in piccata at home cutting down chicken breasts sprinkle with salt and pepper and let the seasoning penetrate the meat dredge and flour cook until Brown then make a sauce for Shallah and both lemon juice and slices return the cutlets to the pan to cook through them finish the sauce with butter capers and parsley so from our Test Kitchen to your kitchen the easy elegant and now foolproof thanks for watching America's Test Kitchen what you think we'll leave a comment and let us know which recipes you're excited to make or you can just say hello you can find links to today's recipes and reviews in the video description and 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Channel: America's Test Kitchen

Views: 204,961

Rating: 4.9304762 out of 5

Keywords: chicken piccata, lemon chicken, cooks illustrated, americas test kitchen, cooking videos, recipes

Id: vp_fnC12UrQ

Length: 9min 1sec (541 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 25 2020