That means chicken milanesa. The word milanesa has no translation but it would appear that its origin is from Milan, Italy. Argentina has a whole lot of Italian in its culture.And that means it's recipe time again. I've got to post something here - that black bastard's picture is wearing me out. It's ingrained already! And I am hungered, so talking about food appeals to me at the moment.
The other day I grabbed up a big package of boneless, skinless chicken breasts that were on sale and they need to be cooked. I decided to make milanesas de pollo today. My days of rib eyes, tenderloin, New York strips, etc. are over for now - unless a nice fat cow happens to wander into my backyard...
Thanks to the chicken littles screeching their pinheads off about global warming, ethanol fuel is big now, causing the price of corn to skyrocket and along with it, meat, milk, cheese - every frickin thing that consumes corn along its way to the grocery stores.
If you must have ethanol fuel, it would make more sense to make it out of sugar cane, like they've been doing forever in Argentina, but what do I know. There are plenty of third world countries, like Louisiana, that grow sugar cane from where we can buy it. Don't need to use up our arable land for it. God, how I hate those fanatical, tyrannical environmentalists.
Anyway, milanesa de pollo is a typical Argentine dish. Milanesas, without the pollo part, are a different dish made out of beef, similar but a slightly different recipe. That's for another day. My friends here really like both styles of milanesas. One ex-boyfriend, who was a total meat and potatoes man, just loved the meat milanesas and learned from me how to make them. He still cooks them up for his family.
This is a very easy recipe, not fancy, but a simple, everyday way to cook up chicken.
Ingredients:
- boneless, skinless chicken breasts or tenders.
The tenders are the most convenient as they don't need cutting to size. Don't try this with thigh meat! It will not work. Take my word for it. If you don't believe me, just try it, but don't say I didn't warn you. You'll end up with raw chicken on the inside and burnt breading on the outside. Never eat undercooked chicken. I'll eat beef blood rare, but you're asking for big trouble if you try that with chicken. - eggs
- milk
- bread crumbs
I don't buy canned bread crumbs anymore. If you read the ingredients, you'll see that they contain hydrogenated oil. Bastards. They will sneak that crap into everything. I make my own bread crumbs. It's very easy and a good use of your stale bread. Just put the stale bread into your blender, start it up and you'll see fine bread crumbs created right before your eyes. I suppose you can freeze it if you don't have any immediate need to bread crumbs. - salt
- pepper
The egg bath
- Rinse the chicken under cold running water, dry on paper towels - remember my paper towel and newspaper trick. Pat the tops dry.
- Season chicken on both sides with salt and pepper
- Whole breast pieces that include both sides will need to be cut in half
- In a bowel large enough to fit all the chicken, break a few eggs.
- Pour a bit of milk in there. Not a cup's worth, maybe 1/4 cup for three eggs.
- Season with salt and pepper.
- Beat it all up until it's a uniform mixture.
- Put all the chicken in the egg mixture.
- You can let it sit there a while or even until much later. Just cover the bowel and put it in the fridge until you're ready to bread them.
- For breading, I use a large pizza pan. It has a short rim and a big surface area, making it ideal for breading stuff.
- I pour the bread crumbs into the pizza pan and shake the pan a bit to spread all the crumbs around.
- Lift a piece of chicken from the egg mixture, let the egg drip off a bit, then lay it on the bread crumbs.
- Cover the top of the chicken with bread crumbs.
- With the base of the palm of your hand, firmly pound the chicken. This serves two purposes. It flattens out the chicken and secures the bread crumbs to it.
- Turn it over and do the same. Be sure you lay it back down on bread crumbs when you turn it over or it will stick to the bottom of the pan.
- Pick up the breaded chicken and shake off the excess bread crumbs. Here's how I do that. I dangle the chicken with one hand. With my other hand I form a little wall with all my fingers, and kind of slap the chicken against it. It's hard to describe. Somehow shake off the excess bread crumbs.
- Lay the breaded piece on a plate. You will end up with a pile of all the flattened, breaded pieces that you can either fry right then or just cover and put in the fridge until you're ready to fry them.
- Add some oil to a frying pan. About a quarter inch high.
- Heat the oil at moderate high
- Carefully add the chicken to the heated oil.
- The sizzle you will hear should sound like a light rain, not a heavy downpour.
- The pieces should not be very thick, not much more than an inch thick, so it should cook up in a few minutes. You will cook them on each side for about 5 minutes.
- Remove from the pan, and put on paper towels to drain.
- You may need to change out the oil if it gets too dark.
- Pile them up on another plate and serve up.
I will usually accompany milanesas de pollo with mashed potatoes and a tossed salad. It is customary to squeeze a little lemon over the top, but that's up to the individual. Lemon wedges are normally placed on the platter with the milanesas.
The kids really like them, especially if you make them small, from chicken tenders. They're like chicken McNuggets and there doesn't exist a child who will not scarf those down.
I'd get started on them right now, but I have no bread crumbs. Since I don't eat bread, there's never stale bread around here from which to make bread crumbs. I'll have to make a trip to the store and see if I can find some bread crumbs without that plastic poison in it.
if you don't have any breadcrumbs - or if you're like me and allergic to wheat - try using cornmeal, chickpea flour or manioc flour (a brazilian product, made from cassava root) instead. I particularly like the manioc flour because it has a nice flavor. It comes in 2 textures - one very fine, and one with larger grains, and i find the larger grains are a lot like breadcrumbs.
ReplyDeleteAlso, i always dip my chicken breasts in (gluten-free) flour, then egg, then the breadcrumbs or manioc flour before frying... somehow the first flouring makes everything stick better.