How One of NYC's Best Italian Chefs Makes Chicken Parmesan | Bon Appétit

Hi, I'm Angie Rito. I'm chef partner at Don Angie and San Sabino. Today I'm making my perfect version of chicken parm. My husband and I opened Don Angie seven years ago. It's our play on an Italian American red sauce joint. To me a perfect chicken parm is all about the balance of textures and flavors. I think it's really important to have a nice crispy crust on the chicken. There should be some meltiness from the cheese and to use really high quality tomatoes for your sauce. First off, we're going to start with the chicken. We're starting with a high quality chicken breast here. When you're shopping around, I think the smaller chicken breasts are ideal. The bigger the breast is, the larger the fibers and the muscles are. So I'm going to go ahead and cut this at a bias. And you can see it kind of naturally has a shape where it's like a little thicker over here, a little thinner over here. So the way that I'm cutting these diagonally, I'm just trying to achieve a natural uniform shape because when I fry them in the pan, they're just going to cook more evenly if the chicken itself is like a uniform thickness all the way across. A very helpful tool is to use a Ziploc bag to pound these. It's really important to create some sort of barrier between your mallet and your chicken, otherwise it'll be kind of like a sticky mess. So the chicken will stick to your cutting board, it'll stick to your mallet. Start from the middle with the mallet and then gently move outward. If I were to start from the ends, I would just kind of like totally pulverize and destroy the ends there. A very small frying pan would work well for this. Even a pot would work. So this process also really tenderizes the chicken. You're kind of like gently breaking up all the muscle fibers in the meat. If you just simply cut it thin and don't pound it, you can really yield very dry end result. Season these a little bit in advance. Give the chicken a moment to take in the seasoning, release a little bit of its natural moisture, which when I go ahead and dredge it, it's going to help with the dredging process. I'm just going to put these in the fridge really quick. We have a low boy here on our chef's pass, very convenient. And then we're going to go ahead and make our sauce. This is a very simple tomato sauce, not many ingredients in it. I love like an eight hour, you know, Sunday gravy kind of thing. But for this particular preparation, we really want something that's like the total opposite. San Marzano DOP tomatoes are grown in this tiny area outside of Naples near Mount Vesuvius. It's like a combination of the volcanic soil from Mount Vesuvius and kind of the proximity to the sea that really combines to create this ideal soil for producing the best produce. If you're just in the regular grocery store, regular San Marzano is a just fine substitute. We're just being like very particular here. They just have like a really intense concentrated tomato flavor. There's like an earthiness to them and just in my opinion, like a perfect balance of sweetness, acidity, and umami. So I'm just going to crush them with my hands. We prefer to do this rather than put it in a food processor or something. You kind of get rustic, organic chunks of tomato throughout the sauce, which are really nice texturally. So next I'm preparing the garlic for this sauce. For this particular recipe, we're going with something that has like a subtle and delicate garlic flavor. I'm leaving the papers intact on there. It's going to protect the garlic as I cook it in the oil. However, I am going to go ahead and just kind of pound them gently. Just kind of in there to infuse their flavor and then we remove them. We're going to start our tomato sauce with some olive oil and I'm going to add my garlic. It's always nice to add salt early on in the process because it kind of helps pull the moisture out of the garlic and start the cooking process along. Usually wait till the garlic's getting a little bit golden before we add the chili flakes. Otherwise the chili flakes might burn. I'm going to go ahead and add the tomatoes. Add some fresh basil. The smell of basil always reminds me of my grandma. She used a whole bunch of basil. Again, this is super rustic. I'm just like throwing these in here. Much like the garlic, I'm going to take it out at the end. So at this point you can kind of season it to your liking. I'm just going to add a little bit of salt and then I'm going to add like a little pinch of sugar. Again, like you don't want this to be sweet by any stretch of the imagination. It has a lot of natural acidity to it so I'm just adding a little sugar to kind of balance out the overall flavor of it. You can let this basil steep for like you know up to 30 minutes. It still has some residual heat in there so it's kind of like slowly cooking but I don't actively have the burner on it or anything like that. Now we're going to move on to breading our chicken. In the restaurant we make our own seasoned breadcrumb mix. You could totally buy like a pre-mixed one at the store. That's fine too. We just prefer to mix our own. It's like something my grandma did. If you have old stale bread, chop it up and put it in like a very low oven. We put in the food processor and then we sift it as well to like really yield this like super super fine result. We just feel like it like yields like a crispier end result. I'm going to add in some potato starch. A really unique ingredient can help you make like really crispy crusts on something like a breaded fried chicken. Helps retain moisture in certain baked goods. I'm going to add a little bit of salt. We like to use granulated onion and garlic. Has that same coarse texture as the the breadcrumbs. This is thyme, dried thyme. We dehydrated that ourselves. The stuff you buy in the store, you don't know how old it is. The quality and flavor of those things do diminish over time. By dehydrating the herbs in-house we concentrate the flavor of the herbs and then we kind of use them right away. You could dry herbs if you want in like a super super low oven or even in the sun like my grandma used to. Alternatively if you don't want to go through all that trouble you just want to make sure you're getting very high quality dried herbs. And then something we really like to add to our breading is tomato powder. You can also totally omit this. It's not necessary. We just feel like it layers in more of that tangy umami tomato flavor in kind of an unexpected place in the recipe. It's actually like in the breading of the chicken which we think is kind of cool. I'm gonna add some cheese to this. So we like to use pecorino toscano. It's a little less salty and sharp than like a pecorino romano. Has like a little bit more of like a tangy earthy flavor to it. And then parmesan. We use 24-month parmigiano-reggiano. If you're using maybe like a lower quality like pre-ground parmesan maybe just like add a little extra in there to get a little more of the parmesan flavor. Because the 24-month parm is it's really intense. I kind of like you know parm too. Like I just I like it all you know. I'm gonna go ahead and prepare the eggs for this. So again might seem kind of crazy because you know we've seasoned the chicken and we seasoned the breadcrumbs. But you know this egg at the end of the day is gonna end up being its own kind of like little layer in the final result here. And we just want to ensure that every aspect of the of the dish has been seasoned thoroughly. Here my dredging station. Just using some flour. The flour is just going to make the eggs stick and the eggs are going to make the breading stick on there really well. I usually try to keep like a dry hand and a wet hand. Otherwise you'll just kind of end up like breading your hands throughout this process. So the goal of this whole process is to create sturdy crispy layer to really hold up to the moisture from all the sauce and cheese we're gonna throw on there. And this is my wet hand here. At this point I'll take my dry hand and I create like a little dry handle for myself here. So that when I go ahead to flip it in theory mostly dry. So now my chicken is breaded and I'm ready to go ahead and start frying it. We prefer to use a cast iron pan for this. Really helps retain the heat in the oil and it ensures an even temperature as you're pan frying. So we use a combination of vegetable oil as well as olive oil. Olive oil has a lower smoke point but we still want to get the flavor of the olive oil. So we kind of mix it sort of half and half with like a neutral oil that's going to sustain a higher smoke point. Throw a little bit of my breading in there. You can see it's starting to sizzle so that's like an indication that this is getting nice and hot. You always want to drop stuff in the pan kind of away from you so you're not splashing hot oil toward yourself. These outside areas here are actually slightly hotter than the very center so I'm kind of strategically putting the chicken there. So I finished cooking all my chicken. Season it with a little bit of salt and then I'm ready to assemble. So I'm going to go ahead and layer a little bit of my tomato sauce. I'm using a stainless steel platter for this. You can use like a baking dish or anything that's safe in an oven or you know can withstand heat. Yeah this is a little more restaurant-y. This is actually the way that we serve our shrimp parm here at San Sabino. I'm intentionally overlapping these just a tad but not too much because I want to make sure that the chicken is getting like equal coverage of all the cheese. Put a little bit more of the sauce on there. Again just leaving some kind of blank pockets there of the crispy breading so it doesn't get drowned out with too much moisture. I'm going to use two types of mozzarella. I want to use your classic heart skim melty mozzarella just to get that like you know cheese pull that everyone's looking for. We do prefer to use grated cheese for this. You have more kind of like surface area here for the cheese to melt in an even way whereas if you use like a slice for example the outside would kind of like brown faster than the middle kind of a more is more mentality here. Put another type of mozzarella here. These are chile ajine which means cherries so it's like a cherry-sized fresh mozzarella. Just to add a little bit more varied texture here I'm just gently kind of like opening these up sort of like rustically just kind of like scattering them. A little more of that pecorino and a little parmesan of course. By a little I mean a lot. So at this point we're ready to go into a broiler. It's technically called a cheese melter. Basically you're just trying to apply super intense heat from one direction to kind of melt the cheese. I'll get a little additional browning on there caramelization. If you're in an oven you're just getting heat kind of like from all angles but in a home oven you can just use the broiler setting on your oven. Nice and bubbly. All the cheeses are nice and melted. We got some nice like pockets of browning on there but not too brown. Looks really delicious. And final touches here. I'm gonna put some fresh pepper and some basil. Basil adds like a nice herbaceous kind of freshness. Cut through all the richness here with all this cheese and sauce. And there we have it. Now for the best part. I get to enjoy it. The chicken's cooked perfectly inside. Get a little basil with that bite. Oh yeah. Super tasty. So you can really taste all the layers of flavor in there. The chicken's perfectly seasoned in the interior as well in the breading. There's little pops of acidity from the fresh tomatoes. Kind of the chunks in the sauce there. And then I'm getting all the textures and flavors of all the various cheeses we added there. And it's delicious. This is totally worth doing at home and again you don't have to take all of the crazy steps that I outline here. It's just important to put a lot of love and care into every step. If you're looking for this recipe you can find it in our cookbook Italian American. To me this really is my perfect plate of chicken parm.