Recipe – Chicken Marsala | All Thyme Great

Hello Friends!

As word of our food blog spreads, we’ve started to get requests. This week we were asked for simple family dishes made with chicken breasts.

Ah, the lowly boneless, skinless chicken breast. Ever the conundrum. Flavorless, rubbery, dry, tough. Just boring. I’ve already revealed my secrets for an amazing Kung Pao Chicken. Now let’s try something more simple – just pan sautéed chicken breast with a pan sauce.

Pan sauces are super easy – but there are ways to mess them up. There are a couple keys – first, is to be sure to properly season your meat and make sure it is thin. Second is develop a nice fond and properly deglaze. And finally one needs to know how to thicken a sauce without it breaking. I’ll take you through these steps with one of the simplest pan sauces – marsala.

Chicken marsala is not in the least bit Italian, sorry. It was probably invented by the English, who just love sweet wines like marsala (from Sicily), sherry and port. The ingredients are simplicity itself:

Chicken Marsala

Ingredients:

1 ½ pounds boneless, skinless chicken breast
All-purpose flour
1 cup sweet marsala wine
½ cup chicken stock
5 ounces sliced mushrooms (white or cremini are fine)
2-3 tablespoons vegetable oil
1-2 teaspoons cornstarch
Salt and pepper
1 tablespoon chopped parsley

Instructions:

First, butterfly the chicken breasts (see photos below). Then put plastic wrap under and over each piece and gently POUND the chicken breasts until they are even size.
Mix about ½ cup of flour with a tablespoon salt and 1/2 tablespoon black pepper. Gently coat each chicken breast piece in the seasoned flour and set aside (or use the plastic bag technique – see below).
Heat the oil in a skillet over medium-high heat. Sauté pieces of the chicken – about 2 minutes each side, until slightly golden brown. Don’t overcrowd – will probably need two batches. Remove to a plate when done.
Add a little more oil and sauté the mushrooms for a 3-4 minutes until slightly softened. Remove to a bowl.
To the hot pan, add the marsala wine and gently scrape the pan to loosen the fond. Once the alcohol has burned off, add the chicken stock and cook for 3-4 minutes.
Mix the cornstarch with a little chicken stock into a slurry. Add about ½ of it to the pan and cook for a couple minutes to see if the sauce has thickened to a consistency you like. Feel free to add more slurry to get it just right. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
Add the chicken and coat with the sauce. Then add the mushrooms and cook 2-3 minutes.
Serve with polenta, potatoes or pasta. Sprinkle with parsley.

Tips and tricks:

As with all simple recipes, technique is key. The secret to juicy chicken breast is to get in even, thin pieces and don’t cook them too long. They won’t be undercooked if sliced and/or pounded thin – I promise. I usually butterfly the breast first – simply put your knife on the side where the breast is thickest, hold the breast with your other hand, and then slice through until almost (but not completely through):

Easy way to flour meat – just put flour and your seasonings in a plastic bag, add your meat, tie it off then SHAKE, BABY, SHAKE. Coats them perfectly. Then just toss the bag when you’re done.

Most recipes don’t use nearly enough marsala. Go nuts – you probably won’t use it for anything else anyway. And it’s great at deglazing:

Cornstarch slurry is the secret way to thicken pan sauces. A lot of recipes add butter at the end. DON’T do it. Butter takes time to emulsify in a hot, stock based sauce – and adding butter at the end risks the sauce breaking if you heat it too much. Save the butter for your polenta or potatoes.