SIMPLE Chicken Cutlets

i'm chef frank this is protocooks and today we're making chicken cutlets [Music] chef frank what are chicken cutlets and how do you make them i'm going to answer both of your questions a cutlet is usually a piece of meat that is pounded out thin and then breaded and fried uh a lot of cultures have them you know germany austria to schnitzel uh in italy it's a coteleta or a milanesa same thing like in mexico they call it a milanesa and basically it's a simple pounded out piece of meat breaded and fried today we're going to make chicken cutlets and i make these quite often my family loves them they're simple to make they're a little time consuming but they're delicious and i always make more than i need it's usually i make enough for like two dinners because we share and then we have sandwiches the next day and they're just delicious and super versatile you can do a lot of different things with them for chicken cutlets i have about two to three pounds of chicken breast i'm going to trim them up and show you how to flatten them out eggs all-purpose flour bread crumbs and i like plain bread crumbs i don't get italian seasoning once in a while i'll put cheese in these but for the most part they're just plain breadcrumbs i'll season them up with salt and pepper vegetable oil or a mild olive oil salt and pepper first thing we're going to do is prepare the chicken breast let's talk about a few things that i have in order to do this job right one of the first things i have is a separate plastic cutting board i don't really like to cut raw chicken on my beautiful wooden cutting board it's hard to clean i don't like to put this under the water so i bought this at a restaurant supply store i'll put a link to something similar in the description but i like to have a plastic board that i can scrub really well and sanitize in the dishwasher i have a knife i have a meat mallet the meat mallet has two sides right it has a flat side and a and like a spiky side now the spiky side is for pieces of meat that aren't tender so if you're gonna do like a chicken fried steak that piece of meat isn't tender and you want to use the spiky side to hit it and get uh the fibers of the muscles kind of more tender whereas this chicken breast we're doing today is super tender already and we're going to use the flat side the first thing that i want to do is take my chicken and the breasts that i have are huge nowadays the chicken breasts are gigantic i do have one normal size this to me is a normal size i like those but sometimes i can only find the big one so this is what i do first what i'm going to do first is take off any fat if there's little pieces of fat or cartilage i try and get those off i want a very clean chicken breast so i take off all the fat and there's like a little piece of like muscle here and tendon i try and take that out and then what i'm gonna do is cut this into a usable size so uh i like to just place my hand on top i'm pressing down lightly just to kind of give the breasts some shape and i'm slicing into thin slices okay press down lightly kind of a nice sawing motion okay and that's what i do to start the process there's two ways i used to pound these cutlets out i'm sure there's more than two ways but these are the ways that i've found the most efficient and what i've used throughout my career the first one is using plastic wrap now this is a little bit more wasteful but i've used it many times as you get a piece of plastic wrap right and you take a piece of your chicken and then you put another piece of plastic wrap on top and you have to make sure that there's room around this because the chicken breast is going to grow when we pound it now again i'm not using the spice because this is tender i'm just going to use the flat side and i'm just going to kind of hit it fairly firm making sure that i don't hit with any corners i want to make sure it hits nice and flat when you hit it with corners you get dents and rips so i'm just going to kind of go around in a circle until i get this fairly thin i don't want it super super thin i just wanted about half the original thickness uh because if it's too thin then it cooks too quick and it's a little dry fair amount of fair amount of pressure you don't want to be lightly tapping you want to make sure that you hit it right so you'll see the chicken spreads out and that's it that's how you pound out a chicken breast here's the second method that i like to use um i like to get a ziploc bag and there's a there's a hinge on this side so what i'll do with the zip lock i will cut off the top and i will cut off the sides so now i have a hinge here i take my chicken cutlet or my chicken piece and i can reuse this multiple times flatten it out right take the chicken cutlet off nice and thin so i like to use the ziploc method just because i'm getting more than one use and i'm not using as much plastic if you don't have a mallet this mallet is about 10 15 bucks i'll put a link to it you can use a saute pan just remember keep it flat all right that's it next thing we're going to do is bread these cutlets standing better procedure is basically a common language that we all have that when you bread something flour then eggs then breadcrumbs now does it have to be breadcrumbs not necessarily you could bread things with whatever you want you want to use cheerios you want to use captain crunch of course i go to cereals why did i go to cereals but you can bread things in anything you want but what you want to do is always start with flour and then eggs the flour and then the eggs basically make a glue on your cutlet that holds the bread crumbs on so i have my cutlets over here on the side i have a sheet tray with parchment to collect my finished breaded cutlets and what i'm going to do is season my flour and my bread crumbs so i'm just going to put a little bit of kosher salt here and a little bit of kosher salt there i'm going to put a little of black pepper in both my flour and my bread crumbs okay and i'm just gonna mix it up now here's uh one of the key things you need to remember when you are breading cutlets or you're breading anything i have a dry hand and a wet hand my right hand is my dry hand i don't go dipping into the bread crumbs and the egg with the same hand because what happens is you get fat fingers and eventually the the breading starts to crust up your fingers and you look like kind of like mickey mouse with white gloves on you don't want to do that you want to make sure you keep a dry hand in a wet hand i have my wet hand is my left my wet hand drops this chicken cutlet into the flower and now this is dry right it's not wet anymore so my wet hand drops the color into the flower i do two or three at a time once i have flour on the cutlet it's not really wet anymore so i can use my my dry hand okay drop all that in again my dry hand is my bread crumbs i want to make sure that my cutlets are well coated in the egg and make sure that there's no lumps of flour you can see right here there's a little bit of a lump of flour and what i do is just try and break those up you don't want too many lumps of flour you can shake off your cutlet a little after you put in the flour better and then what i let this do is i let it drain tap it on the side once or twice okay and then i bread my cutlet i like to tap it a little give it a tap make sure the crumbs are sticking and that's it that's my first breaded cutlet let my cutlet drain off try and get as much egg off as you can and then bury it in the breadcrumbs give it a light tap make sure it's coated really well okay and then onto my tray one more this will make a mess in your kitchen i guarantee it uh i always make a little bit of a mess with this and it's just part of the part of the plan uh so plan for it okay bread it a little tap so my bread crumbs stay on make sure there's no wet spots okay time to fry okay frying in and of itself is a whole other video a whole other lesson i'm gonna give you a few pointers on this one and we'll cover deep frying and pan frying later on in another video but today we're basically pan frying this which means that it's pretty much submerged in a shallow pan it's not a deep pan it's a shallow pan and the product or the chicken cutlets are going to be submerged a couple things you want to think of when you're frying if you put your chicken cutlets in the oil and nothing happens that means you're going to have greasy chicken cutlets when you put your chicken cutlets in the oil you want them to start bubbling and basically what that means is that the water inside the chin color is bubbling out and making everything crisp the oil is not getting in so you want to have the right temperature and i'm shooting for about 350 375. so i have a thermometer if you don't have a thermometer uh get one but 350 375. uh what also happens is when we add product to the oil or we add our tin colors to the oil the temperature is going to drop a little if i say 350 i'll go to 375 once i put the chicken in there it's going to go down a little don't overcrowd your pan don't put too much in there don't stuff everything in there two cutlets in here will be perfect i have a tray with paper towels to drain on i have salt because when these come out of the oil hot i'm going to season them up and i have a pair of tongs you can use a spider or something else to get these out i find tanks to be the best so let's check my oil my oil is close to about what is it we're about 350 right now 360. okay and the oil temperature is important because if the oil is too hot you're going to get the outside burning before the chicken is cooked and if it's too cold it's going to get greasy so you can also test by taking a piece of a breadcrumb you drop the breadcrumb in and you see how fast it gets brown you can see it's not browning really fast it's taking its time so that's good 350 375 is perfect okay so this is what we're going to do the first thing we do is take our cutlet i have a big one here when i drop it i'm going to drop it in away from myself when i drop it i drop away if you drop it in like this the oil is going to splash on you always drop away from yourself one more time i could probably fit two cutlets in here drop it away from myself and there's nothing to be done now you let it cook you see that i have a lot of bubbles here that's perfect i want to see a bunch of bubbles that means that the the liquid or the water is being driven out and it's making everything crisp and my cutlets are going to be nice and juicy i fry all the cutlets now i'm gonna fry them put them in my tray season them up and either eat them now or i'll cool them put them in the fridge for leftovers tomorrow but these cutlets freeze really well too okay i can see i'm getting some nice golden brown i'm gonna give them a turn now i use toms a lot of people don't want to use tongs because they'll scrape the breading off but i'm usually just using the tongs as a flipping thing i'm not really grabbing too tightly and scraping off the crust so i'm just kind of like using it as a flipper but you can see they're bubbling away nicely i'm gonna put my oil over my uh salt over here if you don't have paper towels you can always put a resting rack a rack on here and and drain them on a rack but for the most part if we've done our job right they're not going to be oily okay it only takes about three to four minutes per but look at that i think we're done look at that cutlet it's beautiful i put it on my tray both sides just dab off any excess oil [Applause] okay i'm gonna hit it with a little bit of salt now when i season i go really high up and you really want your oil to come back up to temperature right what happens is if you put your chicken cutlets in if the oil hasn't come back to temperature not only are they a little greasy a lot of times you'll see this coating starts to come off because the chicken starts to cook in steam and it blows the coating off so let's give this a few minutes to come back to temperature and we'll continue frying last of the cutlets are done let's take them out give them a good drain quick little season shut our power off let's plate them and taste them so it's time to taste one thing i want to point out is that these cutlets are super super simple i didn't really put anything but salt and pepper in them now you can kind of jazz them up whatever way you want but depending on what you put into the mix tree you gotta watch when you fry because if you're gonna put stuff in like maybe garlic powder or paprika they might fry up a little darker so let's give it a taste okay that was a big bite really nice the outside is golden and crispy the inside is tender and moist hope you enjoyed this video if you did give us a thumbs up like subscribe hit the little bell to get notifications we try and do a video a week uh we have merch down in the description down below needs salt t-shirts i control the salt t-shirts uh if you want to correspond with us via mail we have a p.o box the address is down below uh we also have a patreon account and i want to thank all my patrons for supporting us i hope you enjoyed this video i'm chef frank this is protocooks have a good one

Channel: ProtoCooks with Chef Frank

Views: 29,902

Rating: 4.984623 out of 5

Keywords: #chickencutlets, #chicken, #needssalt, #cheffrankproto, #cheffrank, #chefdaddy, #protocooks, #proto, #frank, #friedchicken, #icontrolthesalt

Id: ghUfj6YrQEw

Length: 13min 57sec (837 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 12 2020