Recipe Result: Damn good
I remember the first time I tried making chicken marsala in college, in the shared floor kitchen in my dorm. I didn't have a recipe, I just went by my friend Kelly's description of "you just saute the chicken breast, add some flour, add some wine, and you're done." How did that work out, you ask?
First off, I left the chicken breast cutlets way too thick, so it took forever to cook them all the way through. Then the idea of adding flour and then cooking wine left me with this nasty, thick, gooey substance one can maybe classify as a sauce. And I didn't even know how much wine to add, so I started with a few Tbsp, and I saw that all I had in the pan with the chicken was flour paste. So I added more wine, and more, and more, until half the bottle of cooking wine was gone. This girl who was also in the kitchen, and could not have possibly weighed more than 100lbs, said she was getting a buzz from the evaporating alcohol. The end result: inedible.... dang.
Eventually, when I was on an internship and had a proper kitchen and free time and had learned the wonders of cookbooks, I developed much better technique. Thinly sliced breast cutlets, dredging in flour, real wine instead of cooking wine, all that good stuff. And eventually my chicken marsala wasn't half bad.
Last year I got The New Best Recipe by Cooks Illustrated. The cookbook takes popular recipes and scientifically breaks down what ingredients and techniques work best. But I have to say, I disagree with parts of their chicken marsala recipe. The recipe says that between cooking the chicken and cooking the mushrooms, you fry some pancetta to re-grease the pan. I think the bacon-y flavor of pancetta is overkill in this dish, and it calls for too much butter. So I found a pretty good medium between my old recipe and the book's version, and it's worked well for about 3 or 4 iterations so far.
The potatoes on the side were pretty simple too, I won't put up a whole post about them. The recipe is from a Mediterranean cookbook, Olives and Oranges. All I did was take some young red potatoes -- the smaller the better -- and boil them until they're almost cooked through. Remove them from the water, let them become cool to the touch, and then cut each in half. Give each half a quick smash, season with salt, pepper, and dried rosemary, and saute in butter until they get golden-brown and develop a good crisp.
The recipe is after the jump, try it out!
Ingredients:
2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts (a little over 1lb), sliced into thin, flat cutlets
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
2 Tbsp olive oil
2 cups of thinly sliced crimini mushrooms
1 tsp dried rosemary, coarsely ground
1 cup Marsala wine (real wine, none of that supermarket cooking wine crap)
1/2 cup chicken broth
1/2 Tbsp butter
salt and pepper to taste
Procedure:
1. Season both sides of each cutlet, and dredge both sides in the flour.
2. Heat 1 Tbsp of the oil in a skillet over medium-high heat, but not so hot that the oil will smoke. Saute the chicken until each side is browned. Don't try to overcrowd the skillet, take your time, and when each piece is done, put it aside on a plate tented with aluminum foil. Whenever the pan gets too dry between cutlets, add a little bit more oil.
3. By now the pan should be relatively dry, and there should be some good brown bits on the bottom. Add the other Tbsp of olive oil and cook the mushrooms and rosemary, and season with salt and pepper to taste. When the mushrooms are cooked through, remove them from the pan and set aside. Let all the liquid in the pan vaporize.
4. Take the pan off of the burner for 30 sec or so, and deglaze the pan with the wine, scraping the brown bits off the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon. Return the pan to the heat and add the chicken broth.
5. Let the liquid simmer and reduce for about 10 min. Add the butter to the pan, and whisk it into the wine sauce. Then return the chicken and mushrooms to the pan, with the sauce.
Yields about 4 servings.
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