Time to bust out the Chicken Francais recipe. This is one of the first ones I came across/developed when I started this recent interest in cooking. It is simple, quick, easy and makes a dish which tastes like it came out of a New York gourmet restaurant. This is definitely one for company; never ceases to impress.
I came to this when I first ordered Chicken Picatta, then Chicken Francais down at Mamma Maria's. I looked up a few recipes on the internet to get a feel for what they were, then started cooking. This recipe is where I wound up. Basically, it is chicken in a white wine, lemon, caper sauce.
Chicken breast, 1 1/2 lb sliced thin
Chicken broth, 15 oz can
White wine, 1 cup
Lemon juice, 1 cup
Capers, 1.5 oz
Flour, some, like 24 g
Grated Parmesan Cheese, some , like 36 g
Garlic, 2 cloves, 8-10 g
Salt
Pepper
Olive oil, 2 tbl
Make a dredge by mixing the flour, Parmesan, salt, and pepper. I use a 10" stainless steel skillet to make this. Heat the oil in the skillet, coat the chicken pieces with dredge, and brown in the skillet. Reserve the browned chicken. Add more oil if you need to but I try to minimize it. Add the garlic to the remaining oil. Add the can of chicken broth (you can use home made, of course, if you happen to have it on hand) and mix in dredge and browning leavings from the bottom of the skillet. Add wine, lemon juice, and drained capers. Carefully dust the remaining dredge onto the surface stirring it in carefully to avoid clumping (you may have to get out the old whisk and go to work here to break up the lumps) to thicken the sauce. Add the chicken back to the skillet and cook until chicken is done and sauce thickens.
That's it. Takes about 45 minutes. The Italian restaurants serve this over linguine, but I prefer Pennsylvania Dutch egg noodles. We generally have it with a fresh veg, which often means steamed broccoli with lemon juice these days.
Getting fancy? Add in thin slices from a real lemon (as opposed to ReaLemon, which is what I generally wind up using) and garnish with parsley.
It's goood. I know people who will not eat chicken who will eat this dish (Cousin Jim Adams, if you can believe it) after having it served to them.
VARIATIONS
For Zoe, I substitute slices of low fat Tofu for the chicken - works great. I haven't tried it, but I assume you could substitute vegetable broth for the chicken broth and with the Tofu make this truly vegetarian.
These days I seem to be adding 1/4 tsp of ground mustard to everything I make, so I did to the last time I made this.
If you want a little excitement, sprinkle in some red pepper.
Aleks and I made this for dinner with Irene and George the other night to good reviews. We cut the lemon juice - I used 3/4 c for a double recipe, and a nice lemon flavor still came through. I also modified the technique a bit: after I cooked the garlic, I through the remaining flour/cheese dredge into the oil in the pan to make a roux, then I gradually stirred in the liquid as for a gravy. I just thought I had a better chance of not getting lumps this way. Those modifications I would potentially keep.
ReplyDeleteThen we started getting into trouble. Aleks said he wanted a thicker sauce. It turns out what he meant was less sauce. I like a lot of sauce. We tried to meet in the middle by adding a lot of extra flour to make a much thicker sauce, which I thought I would like. But in the end it wasn't as good as when Dad made it at Thanksgiving. Too goopy or something. I think next time I would leave the sauce thin, but maybe appease Aleks a bit by making a little less of it - or buying more bread ahead of time to soak up the sauce!