The Chicken Parm Upgrade: Crispy Cutlets, Melted Baby Tomatoes, & Burrata

Most requested dish, chicken parm, or my version, an elevated version of it. Chicken cutlets, melted baby tomatoes, a little bit of burrata, and a basil salad over the top of it. You ask, you shall receive. So I have all the ingredients in front of us. We have some flour, we'll have eggs, we have breadcrumbs. I'm gonna season these things to make sure that they're delicious. I'm gonna add a little bit of crushed red pepper to the flour, a little bit of salt to the flour and the breadcrumbs, and to the eggs. Throw it right in there. I'm gonna chop that oregano in a moment. I'm gonna add some Parmesan cheese to that breadcrumb also. But before I do any of those things, I'm using chicken thighs, not chicken breasts. And I'll tell you why. There's so much more flavor in a chicken thigh than a chicken breast. And I love the fat content on the interior of it. It melts inside. The fat of that chicken thigh, as you cook it, melts into the meat. And obviously, it just makes everything more delicious. So before anything, I'm gonna flatten these out just a touch. I have two pieces of plastic. I'm protecting this cutting board. I'm just gonna pound these out a little bit. I have a couple already done. I like a little texture to it, so it's not too thin. I'm gonna take this chicken right now and put it inside the refrigerator. Don't worry, I'm gonna wash my hands as well. All right, so I'm gonna chop this oregano up. I'm gonna take some of this oregano, add it to the breadcrumbs, and then the rest of it, I will save for the actual tomato sauce. I really love to cook that oregano inside the sauce. I'll do that with the sofrito, so to speak, with the garlic and olive oil, crushed red pepper. I find that it kind of tampers down some of that floral quality. And oregano could, you know, everything tastes like pizza if you use too much oregano, if it's too heavy-handed. Eggs. Setting up, this is called standard breading procedure. Flour seasoned nicely. There's salt, crushed red pepper inside there. Breadcrumbs seasoned as well. A little bit of oregano, salt inside there also. This is panko we're using. If you wanna use another breadcrumb, fresh breadcrumb, whatever it is that you wanna use, that's great. And then we have a little parm inside, a little parmigiano-reggiano. Chicken parm, you know, when Italian-Americans started to come to the New World, what happened was a lot of those recipes, the eggplant parmigiana, for example, you know, chicken was less expensive. Meat was less expensive than eggplant for a lot of those Italian-Americans that came over. So they would use chicken instead of eggplant, which that version of eggplant parm became a chicken parm for Italian-Americans. And that indulgence of product, these new ingredients that were less expensive and readily available in America became something that, you know, Americans, Italian-Americans really leaned into. The parmigiana aspect is not a reference to Parmesan cheese. It's not a reference to parmigiano-reggiano. It's actually a Sicilian dialect, which means to shingle. And so that shingling of eggplant, which in this case is chicken, is the reference point. As I'm breading these chicken thighs, I'm kind of pressing that breadcrumb in. You'll see that I'm kind of squishing that chicken a little bit, so it's even making it a little bit more thin, if you notice. See that, how nice and thin that is? That's a good shot, look at that. I wish I was that thin. I'm gonna strike all this. I'm gonna get rid of this mess. I'm gonna start to cook these chicken cutlets, and we're gonna talk about those melted baby tomatoes at the same time. So we're gonna make these melted baby tomatoes for this version of a chicken parm. I feel like this is the differentiator. You know, it's not a tomato sauce. These are fresh baby tomatoes that I'm gonna half. Now, I always like to go end to end on this. I don't like to cut them across. It's just a thing. I don't know why. It's just a thing that I do. I cut it from the stem right in half, if you notice. So I always like to have a bench scraper like this, one of these plastic ones on my station, and just always have that around, and I will take my product off the board with that. While I'm finishing this up, I'm gonna turn on this pan at a really low temp. I'm gonna add some extra virgin olive oil here, plenty of olive oil to cover the bottom of this pan. I'm gonna slice this garlic super thin. That's great. I'm gonna add it to the warm olive oil, shake it up. I'm gonna add oregano to this also. As I said, this sofrito is important to me. I wanna cook out a lot of that oregano resin, pinch of crushed red pepper here, a little bit of salt as well. Extra virgin olive oil, garlic. You smell that, brother? Yeah, go ahead. Come over here, like smell that, like that. Isn't that great? I love that. Adding these tomatoes, same thing. I'm gonna add a pinch of salt, but also what the salt does is it withdraws the moisture in those tomatoes, and once that moisture is out, the pectin starts to cook, the seeds start to cook, the skin starts to cook. All of that adds this kind of thickening agent to the sauce as a whole, and the salt helps with that, with that extraction of moisture. So I like to use this jar when it's leftover like this. I mean, what else are you gonna use this for? There's a million things that you could just add a little tomato sauce. This is my signature pomodoro from Martone Street. While that's cooking, I'm gonna move it to the back burner over here. I'm gonna put this again on medium high, and it's gonna cook for like eight minutes or so. While that's cooking in the back, I'm gonna start the chicken cutlets. I'm gonna add enough oil that it comes about halfway up that chicken thigh cutlet. So if you notice, I have rosemary, some thyme, and some basil here, and what I like to do is, as I'm cooking these chicken cutlets, I'll flip them over, and I'll add those herbs directly to this oil, and I just love the perfume that it creates. You look at this, this is the more flat piece of the chicken thigh, and that's gonna make a beautiful color. What would be the skin side down into the oil first? Beautiful. Now, medium high heat. We're just gonna let them go. Come on in here. Look at this. You see the texture of the pectin that's coming out of this on the back of the spoon. You see how thick that is? This is a little chef tip for you. The way it coats the spoon is the way it's gonna coat your food. So you'll see chefs do this all the time, kind of stir something around, and then look at the spoon. That's how it's gonna coat the food. So that's something that we wanna make sure we're taking advantage of. That's a little too thin, and we wanna reduce it a little bit more. Heat's off on the tomatoes. I'm just gonna add a little bit of this basil. All right, I'm gonna add some of this basil to this tomato sauce now, and look at what a beautiful. All right. Stephen, don't go far. Come over here, my friend. Taste this. You're the legitimizer. You make sure that it tastes good. It's hot. Be careful. See how that's turning nice and brown? I want this other side to turn brown also, so I'm gonna flip them around. That center seems to be the hot spot on the pan, and this is cooking, right? Like, this is cooking. It's a constant adjustment of what you're doing. All the time, you're looking at this thing, you're seeing where it's turning brown, and you wanna capture and make sure that all of your chicken is getting brown, so you're just constantly moving and adjusting and maneuvering to make sure that you're getting the best product possible. I'm gonna flip this. Look at how nice and beautiful brown that is. This one's gonna take another minute because I added it late, but you see how that's so nicely cooked. This is for the basil salad that I'm gonna just kind of toss with olive oil and a little bit of salt, and then put it over the top of the burrata and the chicken and the melted baby tomatoes at the end of it, so. Adding more flavor as we go, like every step of the way. You could do a little arugula salad also, maybe mix arugula and basil together if you feel like it, but it'll all come together and make sense in the end. I'm gonna add these things directly to the oil because I just love this flavor. Thyme as well. Look at that. You can hear them kind of crackling and stuff, particularly the thyme. All that flavor is gonna transfer to the chicken also. And while that's cooking, I'm gonna turn up the heat a little bit. I'm gonna add a pat of butter to it. Two things are gonna happen. Obviously, again, a lot of flavor transferred from the butter into the oil, into the herbs, into the chicken. The milk solids in the butter are creating. That steam is gonna help cook that chicken all the way through as well. Smell the butter or the olive oil. You smell the thyme, the rosemary, the basil. So we're gonna go from the pan to the rack. Beautiful color on that. Chicken's cooked all the way through. Got a couple more pieces. Again, same thing. Skin side, what would have been the skin side, right in the pan. We're gonna let that cook. So look at this. I mean, beautiful, crispy exterior. We're gonna cook this the rest of the way on the other side. My mother would cook these all the time, and I like to call them the original protein bar. Like, this was my protein bar growing up. I'm gonna throw a thing of butter in here as well. Beautiful. All right, we are ready to assemble. Chicken, you know what I'm gonna do? They're a little large, so I'm gonna cut them in half. Now, I'm not gonna put this tomato sauce necessarily over the top of all the, a little bit on the chicken cutlet, but I'm gonna use those little white space spots for the tomatoes as well. So a little bit on the chicken, a little bit on the platter. I wanna maintain that crispiness. That's kind of the point of this. My mouth is watering. I'm sorry, I could hardly speak. It makes me so hungry, this stuff. This is delicious. I have this beautiful burrata right here. I'm gonna pierce this and just look at that delicious interior. Look at that. Burrata is, the exterior of it is mozzarella. The interior is what they call stracciatella, and that's the scraps and the trimmings from the mozzarella itself, and it's mixed with cream. Now, a little parmigiano over the top, and then I'm gonna take this olive oil, little olive oil, little basil, little bit of salt inside there. Now, I know that nobody wants to listen to the chef talk about how good their food is. I get it. You don't wanna hear me wax poetic about myself, but this is delicious, and I don't mind saying it. I feel like it's one of those dishes that when you have friends come over or even if you just want a quiet night in, it's worth the effort to make something like this that's just simply gonna make people happy. So my idea of comfort, my version of the chicken parmigiano. Oh my God. See what I mean? You get the oregano in there, the melted tomato. The oregano. And by the way, I promise you, not a single calorie. Not a single one.