KC 250 – Quick Chicken Cutlets & Marsala

Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophes, where shit, shit, It’s past 3 AM again. Sorry, y’all gotta deal with Future Jon. I thought it was 2, and figured I could get a bit of a jump on this post Saturday. We’re cooking some quick and simple chicken cutlets, and using them to make Chicken Marsala, a dish with a mild amount of personal attachment for me and my family, and very little historical weight. So if you want to get straight to cooking, take this link, everyone else, let’s dig in, but I’m calling it a night.

Starting off Strong

Sorry about that, one of the little hiccups between my Port Orchard commitments and my Leavenworth ones is the sudden shift in…temporal arrangements. Between having a day-job, having a social life (since I can now interact with my house-mates/co-workers, who are old friends of mine), and being with a group of people who are, in general, more aligned with my circadian rhythm means I often forget that I built my work-flow around my previous rhythms: it’s much harder to write 2,000 words Saturday and Sunday night when that represents the equivalent of your Thursday and Friday. On top of that is the raw sense of temporal LOSS: The Krampus Kave is, as the name suggests, entirely underground (or, rather, “on the bottom floor of a building built into a hill”) and while staying at Joe’s, I am staying in his basement. Combined with the early nightfall of winter, there are multiple days where I see the sun for maybe 35 minutes? IN short, while I often joke about being a night-owl/mole-man in PO, I really lean into it while up here in the hills.

I even COVER the light in the basement itself, to further darken the space. (That’s actually because of the show: the light was too harsh on my face.)

But it doesn’t FEEL all that different, Hence the shock of “oh god, it’s 3 AM”. To my brain, I had dinner 4 hours ago. Nathan tried to have dinner by 6 PM every night, so it must be around 10. Except, no, I’m now staying at a house where we didn’t get off work until 7, then I had social obligations until 9, and Charlie didn’t get home until 11, so 4 hours from dinner is…3 AM.

Anyway, none of that is relevant to today’s post. But maybe it is, a little. Because the culinary history of this dish is something of a confusing mess itself. So, what is Chicken Marsala?

I intentionally went looking for a bad picture of chicken marsala, and somehow found this. So I guess the answer is “A bag of thank-you Snickers”.

Chicken Marsala (and its brother, which I had never heard of until this day, Veal Marsala) is VERY lightly breaded chicken breast, served with a Marsala and mushroom sauce. Which I know isn’t helpful, since it’s a classic example of “using a word in its own definition”, so let’s take that a step farther: Marsala is a fortified dessert wine from Sicily, which comes from the town of (no points for guessing it) Marsala. That’s a fun detail because technically it means that there is a VERY light Arabic influence in this dish, because Marsala is derived from Arabic: the popular port town was named during the Moorish rule of the island, and comes from “Mars-el-Allah”, or “Port of Allah”.

A couple centuries later, the English show up. A wine merchant named John Woodhouse was in Sicily, and discovered that the way people in this town were making wine was a lot like the Solara method of wine production in Spain. That was VERY interesting to him, because that’s the method used to make SHERRY, which had been a popular drink in England for CENTURIES at that point. So…if these people make wine like the Spaniards do…could you fortify it, and make, essentially, Italian Sherry? The answer, as it turns out, was “yes”, and Woodhouse very quickly found his initial investments in the idea turning solid profits.

A legacy that would long outlast his innovations in Eggs Benedict work.

As a fortified wine, Marsala is a thicker and sweeter drink, with even dry marsalas (Remembering from our Champagne post that “Dry” means “low sugar”) having more than 4 times the sugar of standard wines. The drink was popular for a time, and now has fallen mostly to “it’s good for cooking”, which, personally, I think does undersell it a little. I quite like a tipple of marsala. It’s kind of like a old-school version of Brown-Sugar-Bourbon: there’s brown sugar, vanilla, oakiness. If you like whiskies, I think you’ll like a good marsala.

Nowadays, you’re most likely to see “cooking marsala” like you see “cooking sherry”, both of which are products that plenty of resources tell you to avoid, for which I will provide clarity: you make “cooking wine” by taking not-great wine, and making it so people CAN’T drink it by adding salt and other seasonings to it, along with some preservatives (since you’re not expected to finish a bottle in one evening). The lower quality, and inability to know for sure how much salt went into the wine, is why those sources tell you to avoid it. Yes, it’s like, $3 a bottle, but a cheap sherry is $9 a bottle, and you can DRINK what you don’t cook!

Hey look, Solera Sherry! And this is apparently the best-selling Sherry in the world.

And…that’s really like, all the interesting details about the dish, other than people aren’t 100% sure when or when it first appeared. Many Sicilians hold that it’s essentially the same as Spaghetti and Meatballs, or Chicken Parmigiana: a dish invented by immigrants in America to replicate/improve on foods or flavors they had back home, since Marsala is most commonly used as a braising liquid, or as an additive to stews in Sicilian cooking. You can GET Chicken Marsala in Sicily, but it’s much more common in Italian-American restaurants. And once you know the recipe, you’ll understand why.

Technically a Two-fer

Let’s talk about that recipe now. As Title Jon suggests, technically, today’s recipe is two recipes. And that’s because the first step to Chicken Marsala is just to make some nice little chicken cutlets, which can be used for a variety of tasks beyond Marsala. Hell, they’re fine with just a squirt of barbecue sauce. The one thing that makes these a little weird for the average home cook is that, to get them done on time, you’ve got to beat your meat.

This is me using a potato masher instead of a meat tenderizer, because It felt less likely to mess things up/scare off people.

Yes, the first step is pounding the chicken to one-quarter inch thickness (About 6 millimeters, or half a centimeter if you want to round down) . Pounding does a couple things here: firstly, it makes the meat thinner. This is important because when you’re cooking in…basically anything, thinner = faster. Heat has to penetrate the food, and the less volume, the faster it can do that. By pounding out the cutlets, you’re going to end up with chicken that cooks, start to finish, in about 3 minutes.

It also helps breakdown the muscle fibers, meaning the chicken will be a little more tender, since, essentially, it’s already kind of been chewed a bit. A good pounding (heh) will also leave the chicken fairly uniform, so you don’t have to worry about one end being overdone while the other is raw. The one thing you want to avoid is REALLY pounding the meat: the amount of force you need here is comparable to a mildly enthusiastic clap: not thunderous applause, but a solid “I enjoyed this show, and  maybe had half a drink more than I should have during intermission.”

After that, it’s time to ‘bread’ the chicken. I noted earlier that the cutlets are very lightly breaded. That’s because it’s almost not correct to call what you do to them “breading”. What the typical recipes means by breading is a process I know as “dredging”, and is apparently calling “panade” in British cooking: coating the meat or vegetable in seasoned flour, then an egg, and then another layer of flour or breadcrumbs. This is an abbreviated version of that, because it’s only step one: cover the meat in seasoned flour.

A process that is as mysterious as it is obvious.

This is another important step because of the previous one. As I said earlier, thinner = faster. However, that’s not as accurate for various processes, most relevantly the Maillard reaction. IN short, yes, these chicken cutlets are going to be DONE cooking in 3 minutes, but, without a coating, they’re not going to brown very much, so they will LOOK undercooked. Flour browns faster than chicken, and it does some other  complicated chemical and physical things: the flour dries out the surface, which makes browning easier, since browning can’t occur where there’s too much water, and it forms a conglomeration of wheat proteins, which is important because proteins are what are browning in the Maillard reaction. So it’s adding more stuff TO brown, making it easier to brown, and browning faster. This is such a useful trick for fast browning of meat that it’s actually FROWNED upon in some circles, since it’s almost a performance-enhancing drug for quick seared chops.

Two minutes on one side, 30ish seconds on another, and they’re done.  Well, you’ll want to let them rest, but you can pop them off the heat and let them sit while you work on the next part/wash the pan/go to the bathroom, whatever you wanna do for 5-6 minutes.

I, for one, considered casting them into the fire from whence they came.

At this point, you can go any number of directions. You can make a lemon-caper sauce for Chicken Piccata, you could make a red-wine sauce for a fancy French chicken cutlet, or you can do what we’re doing, and make Marsala.

Mush It Up, Baby

This is where the secret additional use of the breading comes in. See, as that flour browned, some of it got left behind in the pan, so you now have a pan with a mixture of browned flour and chicken proteins, chicken juices, and prepared oil, making this an excellent place to create a sauce. The sauce is ALSO fairly simple, though the number of ingredients in it may make you believe that was a lie. There’s technically 11 ingredients, but once you remove the sort of generic pantry staples, it’s really about 3.

You need to drain some of the excess oil/juices from cooking the chicken if there’s more than 2 tablespoons in the pan, and then you add a tablespoon of butter, and 8 ounces of sliced or chopped mushrooms.

This is, as unlikely as it may seem, a solid start.

I used pre-sliced store mushrooms, because I knew I was going to cook them down a little longer than recommended, so the bigger chunks would shrink up in the pan. I also used the time-honored tradition of “if you don’t like the look of a piece, ‘cut’ it with your spoon”. And you’re just going to brown these guys for 5-6 minutes. Add some aromatics (a minced shallot and some fresh thyme leaves), and then add some flour and tomato paste. The tomato paste will make the sauce richer, and the flour is to absorb the fat and mushroom liquids to make a roux, because the next step is adding the Marsala, along with a splash of soy sauce (same idea as the tomato paste).

There’s a lot of Italian on this bottle, so I have to assume it’s legitimate.

The recipe I’m using, from the incomparable Kenji Lopez-Alt, calls for a sweet Marsala, but sadly the only bottle we could find was of dry, as the label there says. I will note that the bottle was part of a minor Paranormal Activity moment for me: I believed the marsala was last in the dining room, near or under the table. (If that designations seems weird, it’s because, during my father’s illness, we started using the dining room table as one large shelf, and the floor beneath it as another one, a habit we have maintained through raw inertia since) Well, as I rummaged through the various bottles, I slowly provoked both my brother and mother to try and remember where THEY had seen the bottle. Nate’s memory turned out to be correct, which he proved by pulling out the bottle and setting it in plain view…while I was looking around a corner. So when I finally noticed the bottle, to me, it had just APPEARED in the middle of a walkway.

To punish it for scaring me, you reduce it down until it coats the back of a spoon, and then move it off the heat. Add 3 tablespoons of butter, some lemon juice, and salt and pepper, and stir to combine. (This will make the sauce shinier and richer, and is a classic restaurant ‘trick’.  Then, take a ladle of the mushroom sauce, and pour over the chicken.

Or scoop over, depending on how deeply you reduced it.

The results are quite nice. Chicken Marsala is actually one of Nate’s favorite Italian dishes, and he gave the assessment that my version was “pretty good”, so I feel like that counts for something. It’s a nice warm meal, with the sauce hitting a weird point of almost a savory caramel, or a sweeter stew. Not the best descriptions I’ve ever made, but still, I highly recommend trying it out. The chicken recipe alone is a solid option for weeknight meals, and the sauce is basically “wine, mushrooms, shallot, thyme, and things you should already have in your fridge/pantry.”  (If you’re not used to having tomato paste and soy sauce in your fridge/pantry, you should try it. They keep very well, and are pretty cheap, and are used to add umami to a lot of dishes)

Scraping the Skillet Clean

Normally, this is where I’d announce what’s happening on Thursday, and Monday, but right now, I really don’t know. We haven’t established a pattern for how we handle the holiday season on the site: some years I skip it, others I pop out one or two posts. I know, in general, that I find the process of getting those posts done fairly miserable, since I also have to do a lot of travelling. And this year, while quite different, is also much the same, as I’m currently planning to cross the passes…4 times in the next week and a half, depending on conditions: I plan to spend Christmas Eve/Morning with my family, and then come back to wrap up one last weekend of tourism, so A: I’m not trying to rush back with all my stuff on Christmas Eve, and B: we don’t have to finagle stuff with my paycheck as much (since the 28th should be my next payday).  As such, right now, I do not intend to have a post on Thursday, I DO intend to have a post on Monday, and I will probably skip New Year’s Eve. Now, if the pass ends up looking bad enough that I don’t want to try it, maybe we’ll end up doing something for Christmas Eve. Probably watch the new Princess Switch, and see if there’s any more baking in it.

In case that doesn’t happen, I have one last thing to say: I did have a reason for picking today’s recipe, and that’s that Italy was this month’s Universal Yums box. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll get the Patreon Post for the Russian box (which I didn’t get sorted out earlier due to nervous breakdowns, tech week, and other issues), up on the site along with the Italy one. If you are a Patron, I’d really invite you to check out both of them, because the Italy one is going to be a big format change, and I’d like to hear your thoughts. If you AREN’T a Patron, I’d like to invite you, especially with the holidays here, to consider supporting us. Right now, the site covers its technical expenses (web-hosting and so on), but more supporters means I can spend more time and resources on the site. For as little as $1 a month, you can get access to reviews of foreign snacks, occasional extra posts, information on what’s coming up/being considered, and chances to weigh in. Even with the traumatic chaos that was 2020, we’re on track to end the year with about 1 Patreon post every other week, and my goal is to get that production up to once a week. So consider supporting us, and then go that extra step, and actually try it. Hell, think about it this way: you can try it out now, and see if you like it: Try pledging $1 or $5 a month now, and then decide in April or June if you’re getting your money’s worth!

MONDAY: WE CLOSE OUT THE YEAR WITH A PATREON REQUEST THAT GOES WEIRD IN SO MANY WAYS. IT’S TIME TO TTEOK.

Here are the

Recipes

Quick Chicken Cutlets

Ingredients

4 chicken breast halves, further sliced in half horizontally, and then pounded to ¼” thickness

Salt and Fresh Black Pepper

1 cup flour

3 tbsp vegetable oil

Preparation.

1. In a large 12” skillet, heat 1 ½ tbsp. vegetable oil over high heat until smoking. While oil heats, sprinkle chicken with salt and pepper on both sides, and then lightly dredge in flour, shaking off excess.

2. Place half of the chicken in the skillet, and cook, without moving, for 2 minutes, until well-browned, about 2 to 2 ½ minutes. Then flip, cook an additional 30-40 seconds, until cooked through, and move to a plate, tenting with aluminum foil. Heat the other half of the oil, and repeat with the other half of the chicken.

3. Let chicken rest for 5 minutes.  Serve, either as is, or with pan sauce.

Quick Marsala Sauce

Serves 4

Ingredients

4 tbsp unsalted butter

8 oz button or crimini mushrooms, washed and sliced

1 large shallot, minced

1 tsp fresh thyme leaves

1 tsp all-purpose flour

1 tbsp tomato paste

1 tsp soy sauce

1 ½ cups Marsala wine

1 tbsp lemon juice

Salt and pepper, to taste

Preparation

1. In the same pan you just cooked the chicken in, if there’s more than 2 tbsp of fat in the pan, pour some of it off until it’s about 2 tbsp. Then add 1 tbsp of butter, turn the heat to high, and add the mushrooms, cooking until they’re nicely browned (about 6-8 minutes), stirring frequently.

2. Add the shallot and thyme, and cook another minute. Clear a space, and add the tomato paste, allowing to cook for 30-45 seconds to brown a little, and then stir into the mushrooms, adding the flour as well. Cook another 45-60 seconds, to allow the flour to lose its raw flavor, and then add the soy sauce and the Marsala. Scrape up any browned bits in the wine, and simmer until the sauce has reduced to your desired thickness, 5-10 minutes.

3. Remove from the heat, and add the remaining 3 tablespoons butter and lemon juice, whisking to incorporate. Season with salt and pepper, pour sauce over the chicken, and serve.