The Art of Saute: Chicken Picatta (Video Blog!)

By BOB ZIMORINO

Chicken Picatta is a classic Italian sauté style dish. It is simple, and an easy way for me to demonstrate the principles of sauté. It gives you an opportunity to cook this and be on your way to opening the door to many more dishes. We will discuss this aspect at the end of the blog. Let’s get started shall we.

What is Chicken Picatta? Breast of chicken sautéed with white wine and lemon. Watch the short 30-60 second videos below and after the last video, you’ll find the recipe as well as some Side Notes about the ingredients.
 

Video 1: Cutting the chicken into appropriately sized pieces:

 

Video 2:  Pounding the chicken pieces appropriately:

 

Video 3:  Flouring the chicken pieces appropriately:

 

Video 4:  Mushroom prep:

 

Video 5: The prep process which starts with the broccoli (a side dish) and the parsley:

 

Video 6: The sauté.

 

Recipe:

  • Chicken breast         6 – 8 oz. boneless, skinless chicken breast
  • Mushrooms              6- 8 medium sized mushrooms. Baby portobellos are my favorite.
  • Lemon                         juice from 1 lemon.
  • White wine               3 oz.
  • Parsley                      chopped fine.
  • Olive oil, clarified butter, flour, salt and pepper.

Side Notes:

White wine is a personal choice depending on sweetness. If you want the true picatta it should be a relatively dry white like a Soave or a Verdicchio. An inexpensive Chardonnay is a suitable substitute. That being said, you can try this with a Pinot Grigio or even a Riesling. Each different wine will slightly change the characteristics of this dish.

If you don’t drink wine, you can always substitute chicken stock for the wine. This again changes the nature of the dish and if you are using a chicken base for your stock be careful with the salt.

Lemon juice from fresh lemons is of course very tart. Don’t ruin the dish by hitting it with too much lemon. You can always balance it by adding a little more wine and letting the liquids cook down.

Extra Virgin olive oil is perfect for salads but for cooking it is a waste of expensive oil. Later pressings create a lighter, less expensive alternative that has all of the benefits of extra virgin but less viscosity, giving it a slightly higher smoke point and that great olive oil flavor.

In the videos you can see that my olive oil is in a plastic condiment bottle. It is easier to handle than a liter bottle from Costco. I also often times blend extra virgin olive oil with a regular vegetable oil to increase the smoke point but retain the olive oil flavor.

Clarified butter is butter that has been separated to remove the cream so that what you have is just the oil. It is easily done by melting butter at a low temperature and just letting it sit. at that temperature until it separates. The cream being heavier than the oil will mostly sink to the bottom. Skim the remainder off of the top and then slowly pour off the oil until all that you have left in the bottom of the pan are the solids.

The sides that I chose for this dish are pasta with butter and parmesan cheese and broccoli done with the same. If you cut your broccoli florets up enough, you can toss them with the pasta then add your butter and parmesan.

The actual dish took about 9 minutes in the pan. Because I didn’t want to bore you with watching everything as it cooked, I edited this last video down to approximately 4 minute in length, hopefully giving you the crucial steps to completing this dish.

As I said earlier in the blog we have now opened the door to many many dishes. Tune in next week and we will walk through that door into the world of sauté.  Special Thanks to Amy J. Hetzler for co-producing these videos with me. Those are her boots you can see if you look carefully in one of the shots.

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Read Bob’s previous blogs in this series: The Art of Sauté, Part One, The Art of Sauté, Part Two, The Art of Saute, Part Three, and Big Louie and the Dinner Crew.

Visit the “Taste It” archive or check out Bob’s recipes.

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Bob Zimorino is a full-time real estate agent with Lambros/ERA Real Estate, a retired Certified Executive Chef, a musician with the popular local band Mudfoot and the Dirty Soles, a dad, and a grandpa. He shares the experiences from his life that helped shape his careers and hobbies. His weekly “Taste It” blog is his take on the evolution of food in his lifetime.