Chicken Parmi at Home

Oh, it's Monday. It's only just warming up. All right, chicken palma or palmi, depending where you are in the world. Ben, is it a palma or a palmi? Palmi. So it's a fascinating dish. It's taken on many, you know, variations around the world. There's a huge Italian community here in Australia, especially in Victoria and Melbourne. Obviously a huge Italian community in the States as well. So the dish actually comes from the south of Italy. And it would have been done with eggplant at the start, not with chicken. Or if with any cutlet at all, it was always done with eggplant. And then it had a marinara sauce. And I think that was pretty much it. I'm not even sure if the original even had cheese. But we're doing the Australian version today. Like a pub classic dish in Australia. And a good palma is a thing of beauty. It's a dish that I order a lot if I'm in a pub or a club. So we have what we call clubs here. Which are generally surf clubs or like footy clubs and stuff like that. That have menus that serve pub food basically. In Queensland where me and Caitlin live for a long time, you know, you go to the surf club all the time. And they have, you know, shout out the Dickey Beach Surf Club. They've got a pretty good selection of palmas on their menu. But here in Australia, what makes it different is the fact that it's always served with chips. Well, it is usually served with chips. And it's also got ham in it. I have no idea where the ham came from. I'm sure someone will be able to let me know in the comments. But all I'm doing here, I've got some olive oil in a pan. And I'm just going to saute off some garlic. I'm not going to burn it because it'll go bitter, won't it? Yes. So I'm going to really quickly get a can of tomatoes in there because that pan is a little bit too hot and it's about to overcook. Very simple marinara sauce. The garlic's a bit controversial, I think, to Italians. They don't actually use heaps of garlic in their marinara sauce. But I like a bit of garlic in there. Use a bit of water to clean out your tin. Stir it through that garlic. You can turn the heat back on now. Then we can just season it just with some sugar. Sorry, not sugar. I don't know why I was thinking sugar. I was thinking sugar because I was about to say often people put sugar in this. But it depends on your tomatoes. If you've got good quality tomatoes that aren't, that are a bit sour, then you can use a little bit of sugar. Some dried oregano. And we'll just stir that through and we'll continue to cook it. They were chopped tomatoes, so you can kind of break them up as they cook a little bit. Yeah, leave that somewhere away and do its thing while we start crumbing our chicken. So I always use a different board for raw meat especially. And put something underneath it so it doesn't move around. This other board's warped for some reason. I don't know why that's done that over the weekend. But hey, it is what it is. And a pretty simple crumbing station. So we've got some flour, some egg and some panko breadcrumbs, which is also slightly controversial. I think most of the time this would just be breaded in just normal breadcrumbs. We are going to season the flour slightly. We'll also season the chicken. So I wouldn't stress too much about seasoning that too heavy. So chicken breast. We want to butterfly this. If you think about chicken breast, you've got two points. You've got the thicker point and the thinner point. So we're going to go right through the middle at the thickest point. All the way through. We're trying to create basically like a love heart. Now often you'll see people will, at this point, they'll bash it. And they'll bash it for a couple of reasons. You're going to get a bigger surface area. But you'll also get a thickness that's similar all the way over. At home, I'm not too stressed about that. The benefit of bashing it and getting it thinner is it's going to cook quicker. But I think, you know, spending some time in the pan in the oil kind of helps give develop a better crust anyway and without overcooking it. So you don't want it too thick. But you also don't want it too thin. Also depends on your chicken breast. These are quite large, these chicken breasts. So anyway, just really carefully run your blade right through the center. And don't stress too much about it at one end. Because that's the thinnest part anyway. There we go. So we're just going to season this with... Actually, I'm going to wash my hands because I want to use my pepper grinder. We're just going to season it with salt and pepper on the chicken itself directly. Don't forget to stir your marinara sauce. Okay, so cooking salt evenly across. The oven's hot now. And pepper. Then I'll flip it over. Just use a fork so I don't have to wash my fingies again. I have gone through that one a little bit more than I would like. But that's all right. Not to worry. Another good amount of salt on the other side and pepper. And then we can start crumbing it. And crumbing things is my most least favorite job in the kitchen. I've almost out of pepper. I hate crumbing stuff. I don't know. It's just it's messy and annoying and I just don't enjoy it. But that's okay. I'll stop complaining now. Okay, so our marinara sauce is going. We're going to get our pot on to cook our chicken in. Or our pan. I like to shallow fry it. I don't think you need to deep fry it. I think shallow frying is fine. And you can do this in peanut oil. Or you can do it in... I've got the wrong one on. Or you can do it... I like to do it in olive oil. It depends on a couple of things. If you're feeling flush with cash then do it in olive oil. If you're not then just do it in peanut oil. No problem at all. The reason I say flush with cash with the olive oil is you actually need quite a decent amount of it to shallow fry. And olive oil is really expensive at the moment. And I've just ran out so... And we probably need a little bit more than that. No, that'll be all right. Okay, back to the breading. So we're just going to get messy hands here. Into the flour. Press it in. Make sure it gets into all cracks and crevices on both sides. Chicken parmes is one of the things that all the procurement guys and the pub groups kind of run their... You know, it's like a metric of how well the economy's doing. It's like how cheap they can get crumb chicken for because that's literally be one of the biggest things a big pub would buy would be breaded chicken. Which is kind of crazy. Into the egg. Let it drain off a bit. Make sure it's all covered in egg. Because if it's got no egg on it in some spots you're not going to get any breading in that part. And then into the breadcrumbs. And really push it in there. Both sides. If you see any spots at the top just pick up a piece of some of the panko from around the outside. Around the outside, around the outside. And press it in. Now the reality is in a pan that size you can probably actually only do one at a time. So we'll just wait for that pan to get hot so it doesn't get on early enough. And then we'll start frying. Intermission. Okay, our oil is hot enough. It's just starting to smoke but honestly what I'm looking for the most in olive oil is it becomes a lot more fluid. Like it moves around the pan a lot easier. And you don't want this screaming hot. You do want it hot but not like blow your face off hot. Or you're going to have... Your chicken's not going to be cooked before your crumbing's done. So into the pan, lay it away from yourself. And then just give it a little shake. It doesn't have to kind of go crazy but you just want to move it around the pan a little bit. And then let it sit there for a good three or four minutes before we flip it over. We'll probably flip this three times. While that's happening I'm going to crumb this other piece. Then as soon as that comes out we can start assembling and then grilling. I'm going to carefully flip this over now. Oh look at the crust! Oh my god, it's making me salivate. At the same time make sure you've got chopped tomatoes or whole tomatoes. Just break them up a little bit with your back of your wooden spoon. Then while that's finishing off I just want to talk about the oven quickly. The other day I talked about this and I think it threw a few people off. I didn't realize that this wasn't a thing. Unless it's a language thing but this is on a fan grill. This is a fancy fan oven but even in like the old school ovens I used to have that just had a big element in it you could always kind of set it to grill which just means that the heat is all coming from the top. In the US I think sometimes it's called broiler. So set your oven so that the heat's just coming from the top and if your oven doesn't have that function I think the only option you could have would be to you can either just put it in a really really hot oven and it will melt just be careful because it's going to have heat from the other sides as well or you could just use a blow torch to try and get some heat on the top to melt the cheese. Once we've set up this other side we'll flip it back we'll make sure it's really nicely cooked reaching a minimum of internal temperature of like 62 degrees celsius while it still is in the pan we'll pull it off and I'll show you how to start assembling before we pop it in our oven on grill function. All right to assemble so you're gonna do it on a tray it's good they can go in the oven oh over the show today Benjamin Cheese, mozzarella, very important you want a low moisture mozzarella we don't really want to put a piece of buffalo mozzarella on here or it's going to make it very soggy I like decent sized pieces but not too thick and that way I think you're going to get a really lovely well you get really good coverage but then you get that really lovely kind of like bubbly effect all over the whole piece of chicken so slice all your cheese ready to go and then we can assemble I don't know like I said earlier I'm not really too sure where the ham came from and by all means you could absolutely leave the ham off and you'll find some pubs and stuff you know around the place we'll put all kinds of weird stuff on there on their palmies or palmas wherever you're from I've seen some with pineapple seen it with avocado don't agree with that one I don't agree with pineapple either to be honest Chili con carne Chili con carne yeah I almost did it the wrong way around first up ham and for me it's got to be leg ham or champagne ham I don't want no prosciutto I don't want I want ham the reason being is that this stuff cuts a lot easier than like prosciutto you're trying to cut like a piece of prosciutto or parma ham it's kind of hard to cut through I love prosciutto and parma ham it's not right for this application leg ham tomato sauce and you want the sauce to be hot so if you've made the sauce ahead of time I highly encourage you to heat it up again before you do it I also think the good thing about the ham is that it stops the chicken cutlet from getting soggy because you haven't got marinara sauce straight on crispy chicken I also think you can be pretty generous with the sauce get it on there oh splash and now cheese ideally you want a single layer and if you've got some bits that are thicker than others then obviously you're going to put them like near the center that way if they kind of spread out a bit they're not spreading it over the sides you're not wasting cheese get that on there yum so now I've got some chips ready to go in Australia like I said this is always served with chips so good time to start cooking your chips but these are ready for the grill or the broiler in they go now everything's cooked at this point all we're trying to do is get that cheese all lovely and melty a few minutes later now we're talking there you go the chicken parma or parmi depending on where you live in Australia an interesting dish fantastic history it's absolutely delicious but let's have a taste it's absolutely delicious and it has every reason to be a lovely juicy chicken with a crispy crunchy outside smoky ham that rich tomato sauce and lovely creamy cheese there's no way that doesn't taste incredible and everyone always complains that fried chicken creates too much oil at home that one doesn't I just got a shallow fry no excess oil thanks for watching legends loving all the support on this channel lately really appreciate it see you next week on for another episode nom