Give Chicken Parm The Buffalo Treatment For The Ultimate Game Day Meal

Delish

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.

Transcript

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.

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