¶ Wiener Schnitzel — breaded veal scallops, sautéed quickly in clarified butter — is a nice treat, but to be honest it does not taste much like veal, or anything else. Chicken breasts do a better job of standing up to the breading and the frying. But there is a hole in even the most flavorful chicken, a blandness that tempts us to oversalt it, even when, as with schnitzel, there is plenty of salt in the breading. To counter this, I had the idea of coating the breasts with a primer of mustard. I put about a teaspoon of Dijon mustard in a small bowl and then used a pastry brush to apply a very light coat to the moist chicken. Really, there were more streaks than there was mustard.

Then I dredged the breasts in flour, as usual, dipped them in egg, and rolled them in seasoned breadcrumbs. After a few hours in the fridge (covered loosely with wrap), they were ready for the frypan. (One of the advantages of any battered-meat dish is that it can be prepared well in advance, leaving only the brief cooking time to occupy the cook at dinnertime.)

In the finished dish, the mustard was undetectable as such, but the overall flavor was rather more lively. I wonder if the parsley that I usually add to the breadcrumbs would be more effective if minced by itself and stirred into the mustard. 

This entry was posted on Friday, February 1st, 2019 at 1:13 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.