The Chicken My Family Asks for Every Single Week

Today we're gonna make a creamy lemon pepper chicken. This one is easy to make, not a lot of ingredients, and perfect for during the week. All right, let's go over the ingredients quickly. I have four chicken breasts here. We're just gonna pound them to about a half an inch thick. We're gonna season them with salt, pepper, and garlic powder. We'll dredge that flattened chicken into flour. I have about a half a cup here. We're not gonna need it all, but we'll use about two more tablespoons to thicken up our sauce after we sear the chicken. I have lemon slices. That's just gonna be for garnish along with about a quarter cup of minced flat leaf Italian parsley. I have one large shallot. That is minced. Four tablespoons of butter. We're gonna use olive oil and butter combination in this recipe. I have a third of a cup of dry white wine. I have three tablespoons of lemon juice. I have one cup of low sodium chicken stock. I just mixed up Better Than Bouillon chicken base. Half a cup of heavy cream. And then we're gonna put a lot of pepper in here to make it a lemon pepper chicken. All right, for the chicken. You can do this overnight and season them and it'll be even better. So just salt, pepper, garlic powder overnight. But we'll do it right now. Just gonna put it on plastic wrap and then just put plastic wrap on top of it. And we're just gonna flatten them out. These are fairly small. These were Bell and Evans brand. Sometimes you get a chicken breast that's tremendous. If you do, just, you can butterfly the chicken and all that would be, would just take your knife, cut through it, but don't cut all the way to the end and then just kind of matchbook it, open it up and then you can flatten it. But because these are fairly thin already, we'll be all right. I'm just not gonna hit the thin side here. I'm just gonna start kind of from the center and not use too much pressure. So I don't want the chicken to rip too much apart. I have this type of mallet, but I also have one of these that are, that's good too. You know, either one you like. I use this one all the time. And I have like 15 garlic cloves that are in the shell. I just give it a light tap, opens them up easily. This is the thin side here. You can trim if you want, but I don't like to really waste food. So I'll just use the whole thing. And all I'm doing is getting the fattest part to kind of equalize with the thinner parts. We don't need to do super thin here. About a half an inch is going to be good. So about that much. All right, I'll do the other three that I have. All right, so here's the chicken. All four pieces are pounded to roughly a half an inch thick. That's what we're going for. Again, you have really large chicken breasts and it just depends what you buy. You might buy them from Costco or something, larger chicken. You could definitely do that butterflying. Okay, I'm just going to season it up nicely with salt and pepper on both sides and garlic powder. I'm just using diamond crystal kosher salt here. And I just keep pepper in this little like salt box, this mix one that I have for my hot pepper and my regular pepper. I also got a pepper grinder too. We'll add some of that in at the end. Pepper, you know, fresh ground pepper is going to be better, but this makes it awfully easy. Especially when I need to just do something like this quickly. Try not to go crazy, but I definitely want a good amount of garlic powder on these. Okay, we're going to do the other side too. I put all my flour just in little quarter sheet like so. You could also put it in a bag, which would make it even easier if you want. I'm just going to put it on both sides, really get it coated. And then I'm going to shake off the excess like so. And then I'm just going to put it on this parchment paper lined baking sheet. Now you can really scale up this recipe if you want, you can do pounds and pounds of chicken. You'll just increase the proportions on the sauce and everything and you'll be fine. All right, we'll do the rest of them and then we're going to start searing these off. All right, so I have my four pieces that have been floured, dredged in flour. I saved about a quarter cup of that flour, but we'll need about two tablespoons. Four large pounded chicken breasts. We're going to be able to fit, I think, everything in a 14 inch pan. If you don't have a 14 inch pan, just use a 12 inch pan. You'll have to do it in two batches. I'm using stainless here. So we're going to heat this up to about medium heat for three minutes before we put any oil or fat into the pan so the chicken won't stick. All right, so just take your time heating it up. All right, so that's probably hot enough. Just give it a few minutes. Put some oil down in the pan. Don't be shy with it. Let that heat for about 30 seconds. And then we'll just put our chicken in. I'm going to put butter in here too, but often I like to just put the chicken down first in the oil before I add the butter. Okay, and two tablespoons of butter. All we're going to do here is just let them cook, let them get nice and golden brown, naturally release from your pan if it's heated up properly. And we'll do it for about three, four minutes per side, and then we'll flip them, same thing. Okay, so I've just been rotating my pan to get even heat because it's not the largest burner. You probably will have a different experience if you're on a regular stove top. And if you heat it up, your pan, this is a stainless pan. Stainless often tricks people. They, you know, you use it one or two times and then you say everything sticks. You have to heat it up before you put oil down. If you do that right, everything is just going to go like this in the pan. See how everything's just moving around? If you don't do that, everything's going to stick. And you know, recipes will say just wait until it naturally releases, but that could be 15 minutes. Just do what I'm showing you, heat it up properly, and then you'll be able to flip it in three or four minutes. And we're at basically a three minute mark right now. The fact that they skate allows me to like turn them to get the outside edge into the inside before I have to flip. All right, so it's been about four minutes. Let's flip, let's just look at these, see how they are doing. That looks beautiful. Look how good that looks. Beautiful color, that's what we're going for. The butter gives a little bit better color than straight oil, so I always like to use the two of them together. I've been using a lot of lard lately and lard is phenomenal. I just made a traditional Italian dish called polo a la potentina. So it's from Pasoligata from Potenza, the capital. So good, and most of the recipes I came across, they fried the chicken in lard, and yeah, really just great. And I feel like lard is a little bit more accessible too, but I'm not telling you to use lard for this, but you could probably have better results. All right, now it's about three more minutes on that side. So I did four and seven at about medium heat. Your thickness of your chicken, the heat of your stove and everything else will contribute to whether your chicken's done. So you could use an instant read thermometer to check too, but about four and three, you'll be good. And then we're going to pull these out. These look so good. I'm just going to tent these with foil. I mean, those are beautiful already. They're ready to go. Let's turn the heat down just a touch to maybe a little less than medium to medium low. I'm going to put the shallot in and the remaining two tablespoons of butter. It's only going to take about a minute or two for the shallot. Feel like it's a little too hot, just take it off. And I do feel like that's a little too hot. So I'm just going to put that off to the side for one second, lower my heat a little bit more. And I want that very low. Pinch of salt on these shallots. All right, they only took a couple minutes to get nice and soft. We have a lot of nice brown bits in the bottom right here in the center. That's our dredging flour. I'm just going to add two tablespoons of it in here. This is going to help thicken up our sauce. Just going to cook it in this fat for a minute or so just to get rid of all the white spots. Going to add the one third of a cup of dry white wine and then the full cup of chicken stock, low sodium chicken stock. Turn that heat to high. All right, so it's coming to a boil now. I'm going to take my flat edge of my wooden spoon and I just want to clean my pan here. So I'm getting all the flavor bits that were at the bottom incorporated into the sauce. And we'll let this boil for one to two minutes to thicken. It's fairly thick already right now. And you know, if you want the sauce that's thinner, you can add just a little bit more liquid. You can back off one tablespoon of that flour. If you don't want to put any flour in it, you can thicken it at the end with cornstarch. Do you see how like everything's clean now here? All right, that's pretty good. I'm going to lower this basically to low heat. Going to mix in three tablespoons of lemon juice and I'll put in a good pinch of black pepper here. You know what? Let's use some of the grinder too. Got the good grinder, might as well use some. This is, we're making a lemon pepper chicken. This recipe is very similar to chicken franchise. It has a lot more pepper in it. Probably a little bit more lemon juice. This recipe is not in the cookbook. Chicken franchise is in the cookbook, which is right there. You can buy it here, here, and I'm also going to pin it in the comments if you want. There's over a hundred recipes in there, some of the favorites. And if you bought it already, we truly appreciate it. All right, I'm just going to add the cream in too. That's a half a cup of heavy cream. And we're just going to bring this back to kind of a little bit of a simmer, just to get all these flavors to meld together. Get questions a lot about adding heavy cream to an acidic component like this. Heavy cream is 35% fat. It's going to be rare that anything's going to break. If you were to add milk or half and half here, you would have to temper, which is a pain. That's why I don't really use it very often. All right, I just want this to simmer just a touch. So we'll give it a sec. All right, so this is the consistency right now of our sauce. If you want it thicker than that, just let it cook for another couple minutes. It'll just keep concentrating. But that's pretty good. Nice amount of lemon. Really, really good. I could probably use more pepper. We'll see what the taste tester thinks, though. All right, what I'm going to do is I'm going to add in half of the parsley. Going to give great color to it, nice flavor, smell. That's from my garden. Parsley from my garden is so much better than the stuff in the store, no matter what I buy, where I buy it. I'm going to return the chicken, seared chicken breasts, and all those juices. See all those juices? Get them all in there. Yeah, so again, this recipe is similar to franchise. You don't have to really worry about your coating falling off because there is no coating. You just had flour on there, which allows you to get a better sear, get more nooks and crannies in your chicken. And all I'm going to do now is heat this through for about three minutes or so on pretty low heat, just so that the chicken gets thoroughly coated and warmed up again. This looks so good. This would be great with some crusty bread, maybe a half a pound of pasta or so on the side for the sauce. Maybe a little side of broccoli rabe with garlic or broccoli. And I love a couple of lemon slices in here, too. We'll wait for like the last minute You can add them earlier. If you have a ton of lemon flavor already, maybe back off here, but it looks really good. All right, I'm just going to add some lemon slices in here. I'm going to turn off the heat, put a little bit more of that parsley. And if you want to have some nice pieces from the garden, so I'll just put a few on top to garnish to make it look really nice. There you have it. Creamy lemon pepper chicken. Just do that pepper to taste, do that lemon juice to taste. I know you can make this. It's so easy. Scale it up if you have a big family and we're going to see what the taste tester thinks in a second. All right, James, what do you think? Looks good. Looks like a piccata kind of. Yeah, it's kind of like that. See what you think. What's the difference? This is a creamy lemon pepper chicken. So it's heavy on the lemon and heavy on the pepper. Sounds good to me. I think I like it better than piccata. You do, huh? And French cheese. It has all the lemon in it. It's really good. A lot of pepper in there or too much or not enough? No, definitely enough. Okay. Maybe you can use a little less, honestly. A little pasta with that, right? Maybe a little bit more sauce and then a half a pound of angel hair, capellini. I would say like angel hair, spaghetti linguine, one of the like thin like cylinders with those pastas. Will you make pasta with this like tonight? Maybe. I'm making another recipe next. I'm making a recipe for Patreon. I don't really push Patreon here, but doing a pork chops and braised red cabbage with apples, kind of like a very full-ish dish. We offer a poll and we let the Patreon subscribers decide what they want. That's what they picked. You know what would be good in this? Some capers. Capers, yeah. I mean, then it would really are, you're really dancing with piccata there. Yeah. It's pretty similar to piccata, but the thing that I always like about these kinds of chickens is the lemon flavor. And this is just like enhanced so much. So this is probably my favorite. I don't know. It kind of just depends on what I'm in the mood for. Like piccata is like thinner, usually. Thinner sauce, yeah. I'll probably rank them like this. I'll probably rank it like this, piccata, then French cheese. I would say they're all like pretty similar. But in my opinion, like this is a 10. And I think piccata and French cheese are also 10s. Yeah. I just think this is a- This is a higher 10? I just think it's a slightly higher 10. And it's easier to make. Depending on your preference, maybe if you don't like a lot of pepper, like if you can't, because I know some people can't handle pepper like Grandma Fern. Oh yeah, my mother. Maybe take off the pepper, but I personally love it. I think this is perfect. All right. Well, thank you, James. Thank you for watching. And we're going to start moving to two videos a week soon. Maybe when you see this, that will already be happening. I would say until the end of the year. That's simply when we know when people watched most videos. We also know from like our own use, that's when we're making the most recipes too. So it'll probably move to a Tuesday, Thursday schedule into the end of the year. And then probably after that, it will go back to a one a week. But as always, thank you. Could really go for some pasta with this.