Ina Garten-Inspired Chicken Parmigiana
You fry a cutlet to a crisp golden crust, then bury it in sauce and bake it for twenty minutes. The crust does not survive that, and it was the point.
Sauce the cutlet at the last possible moment and give it heat from above, not around it. A spoonful of sauce in the middle, the cheese on top, and three or four minutes under a hot grill — long enough to melt the mozzarella and no longer. The edges of the crust stay dry and crisp, and there is a deliberate contrast between the crunchy rim and the soft, saucy centre.
Restaurants that get this right do it under a salamander, in minutes. Restaurants that get it wrong bake trays of it in advance.
Jump to the recipe ↓Ina Garten-Inspired Chicken Parmigiana
Serves 4 · Main
- Prep
- 25 min
- Cook
- 20 min
- Total
- 45 min
Moderate8 steps, 11 ingredients
Ingredients
- 4 chicken breasts, butterflied and pounded to 1 cm
- 100 g plain flour
- 3 eggs, beaten
- 150 g panko breadcrumbs
- 80 g Parmesan, grated, plus more to finish
- 2 tsp kosher salt, black pepper
- 1 tsp dried oregano
- oil, for shallow frying
- 400 ml thick tomato sauce, warm
- 250 g mozzarella, torn
- basil, to serve
Method
- Mix the panko with the Parmesan, oregano, salt and pepper.
- Flour, egg, then crumb each cutlet, pressing the crumb on firmly.
- Rest them on a rack.15 minutes
- Shallow fry in 1 cm of oil over medium-high, a side, until deep gold. Drain on a rack, not paper.3–4 minutes
- Heat the grill to high.
- Spoon sauce into the centre of each cutlet, leaving a bare border. Top with mozzarella.
- Grill , until the cheese is melted and blistered.3–4 minutes
- Basil and more Parmesan, and serve at once.
Pound the cutlet thin and even
Butterfly the breast and beat it out to about 1 cm. Thin means it cooks through in the same three or four minutes the crumb needs to brown, which removes the entire problem of a pale crust over raw chicken or a burnt crust over dry chicken. It also gives you more crust per bite.
Rest the breaded cutlets before frying
Fifteen minutes on a rack lets the coating hydrate and bond to the chicken. Straight into the oil and the crumb slides off in sheets when you turn it, taking the cheese with it later.
Leave a border of bare crust
Sauce spread edge to edge softens the whole surface. A spoonful in the middle leaves a dry, crunchy rim all the way round — which is what people are actually eating it for.
Storing
Two days. The crust does not survive storage under sauce, so keep any spare cutlets separate and un-sauced, and reheat them on a rack at 190°C before topping.
Questions people ask
Why not bake it in sauce?
Twenty minutes under sauce in an oven turns the crust soft. A brief grill does not.
Why pound the chicken?
So it cooks through in the time the crumb takes to brown, and so there is more crust per bite.
Why rest the breaded cutlets?
The coating hydrates and bonds. Fried immediately, it falls off in the pan.
Can I use fresh breadcrumbs?
Panko stays crisper. Fresh crumbs absorb more oil and go dense.
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