Hi, I’m Amy Riolo. I’m working in the kitchen at Sur La Table in Arlington, Virginia and I’m going to show you how to coat and sauté our chicken breast.
Let’s first begin by talking about our chicken breast. This recipe calls for two chicken breasts that are skinless and boneless which have been sliced in half, widthwise to make them very thin. This is about a quarter cup of all purpose flour, and what I’m going to do is season it with some kosher salt and some freshly grounded black pepper. This is going to make a nice little coating for our chicken breast and then we can just deep each one in very lightly. This is something that we don’t need a strong coating on, it’s just a little something to help it stick from the bottom of the pan and it’s also really going to emulsify our sauce along with the Dijon mustard. So it’s more than just a broth that it’s cooking and it’s actually comes together and becomes a little bit of a sauce, it’s a very nice mixture.
And I love this dish because you’ve got all of the bases covered in one. You’ve got your lean protein from the chicken, you’ve got your carbohydrates from the potatoes and you’ve got all of your wonderful nutrients that are in the vegetables from your zucchini like a lot of vitamin C and potassium and many other nutrients.
So, now that we’ve got our chicken all floured and ready to go, we can start by heating some olive oil in our pan, and what I’m going to do is turn our heat on the medium and I’m going to add a tablespoon of olive oil to the bottom of it, and we’ll just let that heat up for a second and what we’re looking for is for this olive oil to coat the bottom of the pan evenly. When it coats, and when it starts to release its aroma, then we’ll know that we can go ahead and add our chicken breasts safely.
So, I’m starting to smell a little bit of that perfume now. So, I’m going to go ahead and just put my chicken breast in the nice single layer and I’m working on medium high heat. And this is a dish that I became familiar with in Paris. It’s something that’s classic bistro food; you could also do with other pieces of chicken if you didn’t want to do it just with the chicken breast. So, we’re going to let this simmer for about 3 to 5 minutes per side until they get nice and golden.
So, now our chicken has finished sautéing on one side and we can tell it’s ready to flip because we can see the edges of the chicken, how they changed color. The center is remaining still pink and these outsides are remaining like a creamy color, that’s because the underside is already cooked. So, we can just take our tongs and gently turn the chicken over and you see how nice and easy that glides. That’s because it’s really the perfect time to be turning, and the key to evenly cook chicken breast is to make sure that you’re turning it the right time and only turning once. We don’t want to be turning a lot of different times as we’re making this recipe. We’re going to let these cook just for a minute longer.
So, now that we’ve finished sautéing on both sides, we can see that our chicken is nice and golden on either side and just removing them from the pan and setting them aside for one second. While we do that, we’re going to take our zucchini and add our zucchini in and we’re just going to brown our zucchini on either sides. And the only reason for doing this is to give the zucchini a little bit of flavor. Now, if you didn’t want to add zucchini in this dish, you could add broccoli, you could add cauliflower, you could do whatever you like. These are three zucchini which we’ve just added, you could do about three quarters of a pound if you wanted to go by weight, and I like to plan about three quarters of the zucchini per person.
This is a great Mediterranean and European trick. To eating healthy is really to bulk up your recipes using vegetables because if you rely on the majority of your plate being sold up with vegetables instead of with meat or chicken or fish, you’ll have a lower fat dish, you’ll have more fiber and it’s really a key to healthful living. You’ll also get the benefit of all of the vitamins and minerals.
So, we can see now our zucchini is starting to get golden brown and it’s all we wanted to do is to give it just a little bit of flavor like this. Once we’ve done that, I’m going to add my chicken right back into the pan and the zucchini will make like a little bed for our chicken.
Now, I’m going to add two cups of reduced sodium chicken sock. So, what I’m going to is just pour this right over the mixer. Now, we can see where the sauces are starting to boil here, that’s perfect, this is exactly the temperature we wanted to be. Now, I’m turning this down to a simmer and I’m going to cover it with the lid then when we come back in 20 minutes, we’ll remove our zucchini and our chicken which should be cooked through completely and we’ll add our Dijon mustard to emulsify our sauce and we’ll be able to plate our chicken and zucchini.
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