Give chicken Parm the buffalo treatment to get this a crispy-on-the-outside, juicy-on-the-inside chicken cutlet smothered in sauce and topped with cheese.
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00:00Hey everybody, it's Brooke in the Delish Kitchen studios.
00:03Delish, we love a good mashup.
00:05This time, it's gonna be a cross between
00:07classic chicken parm and buffalo wings.
00:12That's right, I know you've never heard of this before,
00:14but that's okay, I'm gonna walk you through it.
00:16It's a crispy on the outside,
00:17juicy on the inside chicken cutlet
00:20that's smothered in plenty of bubbly mozzarella cheese
00:23and then topped with our spicy buffalo sauce
00:25and a little bit of cool ranch dressing, of course.
00:28This is the meal that your Nona would eat
00:29if she was gonna watch her two favorite teams
00:31go head-to-head in football.
00:33Let's get into it.
00:37One of the classic characteristics of good chicken parm
00:40is a nice, thin cutlet.
00:42To do that, we have two steps.
00:44You're gonna take your chicken cutlet,
00:46take a really sharp knife,
00:48then butterfly it through the center of the chicken cutlet,
00:52open it up, and then completely separate the two halves
00:54so that you have two pieces from one chicken breast.
00:58We're gonna then take a meat mallet,
01:00gently, well, not that gently,
01:03pound the chicken out until it's about
01:05a quarter of an inch thick.
01:06Making sure that you take this time
01:08to pound your chicken out and get it nice and thin
01:10will mean that you'll have a great ratio
01:12of juicy chicken to crispy outside
01:15instead of undercooked, thick chicken
01:17and burnt outside or uncrispy outside.
01:20It's all about that delicate balance.
01:22After you've pounded the chicken out nice and thin,
01:25you wanna hit each piece with a pinch of kosher salt
01:27on both sides.
01:29When it comes to frying, you want to be efficient,
01:31and the best way to be efficient
01:33is to set yourself up a little dredging station
01:35before you get started.
01:37Dredging station is made up of three components.
01:40You have your flour, you have egg,
01:42and then you have whatever breadcrumb
01:44you're gonna be breading the outside of your chicken with.
01:46We're gonna season our breadcrumbs
01:48with a little bit of dried oregano
01:50and some grated Parmesan cheese.
01:52You wanna start by coating it in a layer of flour,
01:56tap off any excess flour, transfer it to your beaten eggs,
01:59get a nice coating of eggs on the piece of chicken,
02:02and then finally transfer it to your seasoned
02:04panko breadcrumbs, and then you're gonna rest it
02:06on a sheet tray so they can just hang out
02:08while you finish the rest of your chicken pieces.
02:10It's time to get frying.
02:12Our chicken cutlets are breaded.
02:13I've got a cast iron skillet here to do my frying in,
02:16which I personally prefer whether I'm doing a shallow fry
02:18or a deep fry.
02:20Cast iron tends to hold onto heat a lot better
02:22than other materials do,
02:24so your temperature won't fluctuate all crazy,
02:26especially if you have a lot of things to fry.
02:28Cast iron is the way to go.
02:30It's only about a cup of oil in the pan here,
02:32and the heat's over medium,
02:34so we wanna get this oil to about 350,
02:37but it's kind of difficult to measure
02:38the heat of so little oil.
02:41So once it starts shimmering,
02:43and you can sort of feel the heat radiating off of it,
02:46that's when you know it's about ready to go.
02:48I'm gonna put each piece of chicken in the pan
02:49for about two minutes per side.
02:51One of the biggest complaints with frying food,
02:53especially at home,
02:55is that the end result is greasy and logged with oil.
02:58I gotta tell you, though,
02:59that has a lot more to do with the temperature
03:02that the oil is at than the actual product itself.
03:05The best way to avoid having your oil temperature
03:07drop too low is to not overcrowd the pan.
03:10You put more than two pieces of chicken
03:12in even a pan that's this big,
03:14the oil temperature's gonna start to drop a lot faster
03:16than you want it to.
03:17That's gonna leave you with cold oil and soggy chicken,
03:20and you don't want that.
03:21One of my favorite culinary discoveries has been
03:25that buffalo sauce is literally just hot sauce and butter,
03:28and that's what we're gonna do.
03:30Just add about a quarter cup of hot sauce
03:33to a saucepan and some butter.
03:37Then I'm gonna heat this over medium heat
03:38just until the butter starts to melt.
03:40Then I'm gonna vigorously whisk the butter
03:42into the hot sauce so that everything
03:43can be all nice and smooth and homogenized,
03:47and that's pretty much it.
03:48The last step to nail this buffalo chicken parm
03:51is actually my favorite step.
03:53We're gonna take this buffalo sauce that we just made,
03:55spoon a little bit over the chicken cutlets
03:57just so that sauce has a chance
03:59to really soak into the breading.
04:01Then we're gonna top it with a little bit
04:03of mozzarella cheese and some Parmesan cheese.
04:05Last but not least, we're gonna pop all that
04:07into the broiler so the cheese has a chance to melt,
04:10get nice and bubbly and gooey with a couple of brown spots.
04:14We're gonna take it out,
04:15top it with more buffalo sauce
04:17and a little bit of drizzled ranch.
04:19Then we'll be all done.
04:20The breading on this chicken is perfectly golden brown,
04:24and I love that step we did where we added
04:25a little bit of sauce to it before we broiled it.
04:28Now we gotta just try it.
04:32Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, that's really good.
04:37It's like a giant buffalo wing with cheese.
04:40There's nothing bad about this whatsoever.
04:43The crust we got on there is just insanely crispy.
04:46I love using panko for shallow-frying things,
04:48but the inside is perfectly cooked.
04:50It's not dried out,
04:51and that's because we pounded it thin, like I said.
04:54So now you've got that perfect balance
04:56of juicy inside and crispy outside.
04:58And this buffalo sauce, usually, y'all,
05:00I'm not that great with spicy things,
05:03but the butter melted it out real nice,
05:05so it's not too spicy.
05:06And then, of course, you got the ranch in there
05:08to also cool it down some.
05:09This is perfect all around.
05:12This is perfect to serve on a weeknight
05:14because it's super easy,
05:15or you could even serve this on game day,
05:17and nobody will miss the wings, I promise.
05:19If you want more easy chicken recipes just like this,
05:21keep it right here at delish.com.