How One of NYC's Best Italian Chefs Makes Chicken Parmesan

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Hi, I am Angie Rito.

I am chef partner at Don Angie and San Sabino.

Today I'm making my perfect version of chicken parm.

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My husband and I opened Don Angie seven years ago.

It's our play on Italian American red sauce joint.

To me a perfect chicken parm is all about the balance

of textures and flavors.

I think it's really important

to have a nice crispy crust on the chicken.

There should be some meltiness from the cheese

and to use really high quality tomatoes for your sauce.

First off, we're gonna start with the chicken.

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We're starting with a high quality chicken breast here

and when you're shopping around,

I think the smaller chicken breasts are ideal.

The bigger the breast is,

the larger the fibers in the muscles are.

So I'm gonna go ahead and cut this at a bias.

And you can see it kind of naturally has a shape

where it's like a little thicker over here,

a little thinner over here.

So the way that I'm cutting these diagonally,

I'm just trying to achieve a natural uniform shape

'cause when I fry them in the pan,

they're just gonna cook more evenly.

If the chicken itself is like a uniform thickness

all the way across.

A very helpful tool is to use a Ziploc bag to pound these.

It's really important to create some sort of barrier

between your mallet and your chicken,

otherwise it'll be kind of like a sticky mess.

So the chicken will stick to your cutting board,

it'll stick to your mallet.

Start from the middle with the mallet

and then gently move outward.

If I were to start from the ends,

I would just kind of like totally pulverize

and destroy the ends there.

A very small frying pan would work well for this.

Even a pot would work.

So this process also really tenderizes the chicken.

You're kind of like gently breaking up

all the muscle fibers in the meat.

If you just simply cut it thin and don't pound it,

you can really yield very dry end results.

Season these a little bit in advance,

give the chicken a moment to take in the seasoning,

release a little bit of its natural moisture,

which when I go ahead and dredge it,

it's gonna help with the dredging process.

I'm just gonna put these in the fridge really quick.

We have a low boy here on our chef's base,

very convenient.

And then we're gonna go ahead and make our sauce.

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This is a very simple tomato sauce.

Not many ingredients in it.

I love like an eight hour, you know,

Sunday gravy kind of thing.

But for this particular preparation,

we really want something that's like the total opposite.

San Marzano DOP tomatoes are grown in this tiny little area

outside of Naples near Mount Vesuvius.

It's like a combination

of the volcanic soil from Mount Vesuvius

and kind of the proximity to the sea that really combines

to create this ideal soil

for producing the best produce.

If you're just in the regular grocery store,

regular San Marzano is a just fine substitute.

We're just being like very particular here.

They just have like a really intense,

concentrated tomato flavor.

There's like an earthiness to them

and just in my opinion,

like a perfect balance of sweetness, acidity, and umami.

So I'm just gonna crush 'em with my hands.

We prefer to do this

rather than put in a food processor or something.

So you kinda get rustic, organic chunks

of tomato throughout the sauce,

which are really nice texturally.

So next I'm preparing the garlic for this sauce.

For this particular recipe,

we're going with something

that has like a subtle and delicate garlic flavor.

I'm leaving the papers intact on there.

It's gonna protect the garlic as I cook it in the oil.

However, I am gonna go ahead

and just kind of pound them gently,

just kind of in there to infuse their flavor

and then we remove them.

We're gonna start our tomato sauce

with some olive oil and I'm gonna add my garlic.

It's always nice to add salt early on in the process

because it kind of helps pull the moisture out of the garlic

and start the cooking process along.

Usually wait till the garlic's getting a little bit golden

before we add the chili flakes.

Otherwise the chili flakes might burn.

I'm gonna go ahead and add the tomatoes.

Add some fresh basil.

Smell of basil always reminds me of my grandma.

She used a whole bunch of basil.

Again, this is super rustic.

I'm just like throwing these in here.

Much like the garlic,

I'm gonna take it out at the end.

So at this point you can kind of season it to your liking.

I'm just gonna add a little bit of salt

and then I'm gonna add like a little pinch of sugar.

Again, like you don't want this to be sweet

by any stretch of the imagination.

It has a lot of natural acidity to it.

So I'm just adding a little sugar

to kind of balance out the overall flavor of it.

Can let this basil steep for like, you know,

up to 30 minutes.

It still has some residual heat in there,

so it's kind of like slowly cooking,

but I don't actively have the burner on it

or anything like that.

Now we're gonna move on to breading our chicken.

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In the restaurant,

we make our own seasoned breadcrumb mix.

You could totally buy like a pre-mixed one at the store.

That's fine too. We just prefer to mix our own.

It's like something my grandma did.

If you have old stale bread,

chop it up and put it in like a very low oven.

We put in the food processor

and then we sift it as well

to like really yield this like super, super fine result.

We just feel like it like yields,

like a crispier end result.

I'm gonna add in some potato starch.

A really unique ingredient

can help you make like really crispy crusts

on something like a breaded fried chicken.

Helps retain moisture in certain baked goods.

I'm gonna add a little bit of salt.

We like to use granulated onion

and garlic has that same coarse texture

as the the breadcrumbs.

This is thyme, dried thyme.

We dehydrated that ourselves.

The stuff you buy in the store,

you don't know how old it is.

The quality and flavor of those things

do diminish over time.

By dehydrating the herbs in-house,

we concentrate the flavor of the herbs

and then we kind of use them right away.

You could dry herbs if you want,

in like a super, super low oven

or even in the sun like my grandma used to.

Alternatively, if you don't wanna go through

all that trouble,

you just wanna make sure you're getting

very high quality dried herbs.

And then something we really like to add

to our breading is tomato powder.

You can also totally omit this. It's not necessary.

We just feel like it layers in more

of that tangy umami tomato flavor

in kind of an unexpected place in the recipe.

It's actually like in the breading of the chicken,

which we think is kind of cool.

I'm gonna add some cheese to this.

So we like to use Pecorino Toscano.

It's a little less salty

and sharp than like a Pecorino Romano.

It has like a little bit more

of like a tangy, earthy flavor to it.

And then Parmesan, we use 24 month Parmigiano Reggiano.

If you're using maybe like a lower quality

like pre-ground Parmesan,

maybe just like add a little extra in there

to get a little more of the Parmesan flavor

'cause the 24 month parm is, it's really intense.

I kinda like, you know, [beeps] parm too.

Like I just, I like it all, you know. [laughs]

I'm gonna go ahead and prepare the eggs for this.

So again, it might seem kind of crazy

because you know, we've seasoned the chicken

and we seasoned the breadcrumbs,

but you know, this egg at the end of the day

is gonna end up being its own kind

of like little layer in the final result here.

And we just want to ensure that every aspect

of the dish has been seasoned thoroughly.

Here my dredging station, just using some flour.

The flour's just gonna make the eggs stick

and the eggs are gonna make the breading stick

on there really well.

I usually try to keep like a dry hand and a wet hand.

Otherwise you'll just kind of end up

like breading your hands throughout this process.

So the goal of this whole process is to create sturdy,

crispy layer to really hold up

to the moisture from all the sauce

and cheese we're gonna throw on there.

And this is my wet hand here.

At this point I'll take my dry hand

and I create like a little dry handle for myself here,

so that when I go ahead to flip it,

in theory, mostly dry.

So now my chicken is breaded

and I'm ready to go ahead and start frying it.

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We prefer to use a cast iron pan for this.

Really helps retain the heat in the oil

and it ensures an even temperature as you're pan frying.

So we use a combination of vegetable oil

as well as olive oil.

And olive oil has a lower smoke point,

but we still wanna get the flavor of the olive oil.

So we kind of mix it sort of half and half

with like a neutral oil

that's gonna sustain a higher smoke point.

Throw a little bit of my breading in there,

you can see it's starting to sizzle.

So that's like an indication

that this is getting nice and hot.

You always wanna drop stuff in the pan

kind of away from you

so you're not splashing hot oil toward yourself.

These outside areas here are actually slightly hotter

than the very center,

so I'm kind of strategically

putting the chicken there.

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So I finished cooking all my chicken,

season it with a little bit of salt,

and then I'm ready to assemble.

So I'm gonna go ahead

and layer a little bit of my tomato sauce.

I'm using a stainless steel platter for this.

You can use like a baking dish

or anything that's safe in an oven

or you know, can withstand heat.

Yeah, this is a little more restauranty.

This is actually the way

that we serve our shrimp parm here at San Sabino.

I'm intentionally overlapping these just a tad,

but not too much because I wanna make sure

that the chicken is getting

like equal coverage of all the cheese.

Put a little bit more of the sauce on there.

Again, just leaving some kind of blank pockets there

of the crispy breading

so it doesn't get drowned out with too much moisture.

I am going to use two types of mozzarella.

I wanna use your classic part skim, melty mozzarella

just to get that like you know,

cheese pull that everyone's looking for.

We do prefer to use grated cheese for this.

You have more kind of like surface area here

for the cheese to melt in an even way.

Whereas if you use like a slice for example,

the outside would kinda like brown faster than the middle.

Kinda a more is more mentality here.

But another type of mozz here,

these are ciliegine, which means cherries.

So it's like a cherry sized fresh mozzarella.

Just to add a little bit more varied texture here,

I'm just gently kind of like opening these up,

sort of like rustically,

just kinda like scattering them.

A little more of that Pecorino and a little Parmesan,

of course, by a little, I mean a lot. [laughs]

So at this point we're ready to go into a broiler.

It's technically called a cheese melter.

Basically you're just trying to apply

super intense heat from one direction

to kind of melt the cheese,

get a little additional browning on there, caramelization.

If you're in an oven,

you're just getting heat kind of like from all angles.

But in a home oven

you can just use the broiler setting on your oven.

Nice and bubbly.

All the cheeses are nice and melted.

We got some nice like pockets

of browning on there, but not too brown.

Looks really delicious.

And final touches here,

I'm gonna put some fresh pepper

and some basil.

Basil adds like a nice herbaceous kind of freshness.

Cut through all the richness here

with all this cheese and sauce.

And there we have it.

Now for the best part,

I get to enjoy it.

It's chickens cooked perfectly inside.

A little basil with that bite.

Oh yeah, super tasty.

So you can really taste all the layers of flavor in there.

The chicken's perfectly seasoned in the interior

as well in the breading.

There's little pops of acidity

from the fresh tomatoes,

kind of the chunks and the sauce there.

And then I'm getting all the textures

and flavors of all the various cheeses we added there.

And it's delicious.

This is totally worth doing at home.

And again, you don't have to take

all of the crazy steps that I outlined here.

It is just important to put a lot of love

and care into every step.

But if you're looking for this recipe,

you can find it in our cookbook, Italian American.

To me, this really is my perfect plate of chicken parm.

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