Chicken Marsala

Chef Jerry Gruber prepares traditional Chicken Marsala

Chicken Marsala This is just a traditional Italian dish, it’s called Chicken Marsala but I put a little touch on it and a little different to everybody else but, because I’ve put sun dried tomatoes in mine and I’ll just make a little and add some capers in it so I’ll make it a little different. I’m going to start out with the hot pan and to my hot pan, I’m going to add the major ingredient, olive oil. Now to my olive oil, the first thing I’m going to add these are sweet onions. These are Maui onions and Maui onions are a little different in yellow onions or white onions. They’re just a little sweeter. Vidalia onions work really well, too. Purple onions work really good too but you want a sweet onion and it’s nicer than a sharp onion. If you’re making soups or something like that and it doesn’t make any difference at all. These are going to sauté and then these are Portobello Mushrooms. This is what a Portobello looks like. These are small Portobello. They called it stuffing Portobello. Get down here and we’ll cut it this way. This way you never cut or so, we throw our mushrooms here, do another mushroom here, cut it in half and you can cut if don’t want to cut yourself you can just do it like this. Let’s put the mushrooms in here. Now, we’re going to cook this up a little bit. Now, after this is cooked a little bit, we want to add our garlic to it. Never put the garlic in the pan first because if the garlic burns it wrecks the whole dish. So, we’re going to put the garlic in. After we’ve got something else in the pan, here just regular chicken breast that I cut up before you got in and remember whenever you’re cutting chicken on your cutting board I always clean the cutting board after because people don’t get salmonella poisoning from chicken. They get it from your cutting board because once a chicken cooks all the poison gets out of it. It’s what’s left on the board and then just slice an onion and slice a pepper and you know celery or something and you’re using the same cutting board. So always remember rinse your cutting board, change your cutting board change, your cutting board turn your cutting board over to the other side. Now I kind of like a little bit of a wine tasted this and also I want to deglaze the bottom of the pan, to switch on the bottom of the pan and things that sticks. It has really good stock. So, I just put a little wine in here, and kind of burn it off and add a little chicken stock to it. Now, these are sun-dried tomatoes. You can get the dried ones and soak them and reconstitute them with water. You can do it in a microwave or just let it sit up for a few hours or you can buy them once in olive oil which are they’re both equally as good. So, this is my own recipe I like sun dried tomatoes in my Marsala, you won’t find that in a recipe book, you won’t find that online. I will put our sun-dried in and now these are just capers, just regular capers and I’m going to put a little Lea & Perrin Worcestershire sauce, just a little, a little magic elixir, a little Tabasco sauce, a little bit of soy sauce and we’re going to put a little butter, just a tiny bit. Never use margarine. Margarine is the worst thing on the planet for you. If you put margarine out, in the middle of the room and rest it overnight not even the cockroaches will eat it. It’s kind of anything worst in margarine, so if you’re going to submerge, try to use oils. Olive oil is wonderful for you but, if you have a choice use butter over margarine any time. Now, what will this be if we didn’t put a little basil in it because it’s an Italian dish and basil is very Italian although the Chinese and the Japanese have adopted it now to so they’re using it. It’s like cilantro its kind of Chinese but it’s Mexican too they use a lot of cilantro in their cooking. So I’m just going to chiffonade this a little. Always add your spices last because what happens if you put it in first, they disappear, the flavor just cooks off so that’s my last thing for this .I’m getting my basil and get our chicken cooked in here. I’ll get more chicken cooking. I want for your color a little bit so the reason of this color is a paprika and there’s salt and pepper in it and a little of Renee’s Rub. Now, usually when you make a Marsala, you just do the whole chicken breast and I felt I do nice little pieces or everybody gets some and I don’t have to cut it up at the end and I know the juices squirt out of it and you’ll lose it. We’re improvising today and I think we should be apply it for everybody. I’ll get rid of this. I get more on meat and just stick to my apron to. Alright, we just have to let this cook this a little. Now, we’re going to cook right this back into this and we’re going to season it a little bit and we’ll be done. Now, what happens here is a lot in this pan and normally I won’t put this much in but I want to do all in one shot but the more you put the pan the more, it cools it down. So even when you have a hot pan if you put a lot of stock in it, what happens is it cooks slowly. So, getting it cooked a little and I’m turning it all over and some little tricks, if you’re making soups and you over salt a soup you don’t know how to get the salt out of the soup once you put too much in? We put a potato, take a raw potato, cut it in quarters and put it in until it’s soft and then you take it out and it will take 70% of that salt out. And salt and pepper, sometimes you broth care it still work but if you over pepper something, if it’s black or white pepper sometimes it carry over but if it’s red pepper or pepper flakes or whatever I think you’re cooked. You have to make more sauce. You have to stretch it and make more out of it. We need a little more oil. You never should put oil in after you started cooking it because it slows it down because you always not have but I’m doing it anyway. If you have herbs in your house in your spice cabinet that are more than six months old, throw everything in this spice cabinet and you’re going to start all over again because it’s no good anyway and you never know how strong it is. It’s been there too long and everybody loves chop food and sometimes we have herbs and spices have been there for years. So how long that oregano have been in there? “Oh, just two or three years, that’s all. Well, that’s okay but, if a recipe calls for two teaspoons of oregano, if you have three of oregano it might take 60’s if you can’t your measurements are always going to be off. So you never want to do it. Start all over again, buy new spices and don’t buy the spices in the bottle, but the ones in the cellophane packages. They cost a dollar to those and the ones in the bottles cost four dollars and take them out of cellophane and pour them back into your bottle and refill your bottle. You’ll save $3.00 for your spices and try to shop for your exotics at the Asian Market or the Mediterranean store because you can get stuffs that are so much cheaper there. You can buy it at bulk like roasted red peppers. If you just buy a little bit in the jar at a supermarket, it’s $3.00 per a jar of red peppers. You can go to the Asian Market and for $5.00 you can get a gallon so put that in mind. You see how the stock in the bottom gets thickened down there, that’s goodness. That’s the part we don’t want to waste. So we’re going to cook our chicken a little bit more and then we’re going to deglaze our pan so we get all the goodness and then we’re going to put mineral washing machine so we can get all the flour off. Now, how do you tell when if the chicken is done well? It looks done in the middle. We’ll just take a little piece off and we’ll cut it and as you can see that’s perfect. Do you see part of it, moist lovely and again we take our magical leeks here. And kick it up a notch. This is Marsala wine. Hence, the name Chicken Marsala, Can you smell that? There’s an old guy who used to be on TV. He used to wear red suspenders. He’s from down south and he would say, “Lock the door, I guarantee you to be good, old Justin Wilson. I wished he was still around. A little more chicken stock, you got little more fresh herbs and you’re cooking the layers and you cook and then you add and you change it a little bit so you want to keep tasting it and keep saying about your consistency and make it a little thinner or make it a little thicker. Put some salt, and better put a ground pepper in it and always don’t be afraid, salt and pepper everything. When you make fish, when you make chicken, when you grill stuff always season it first, you want to bring out as much flavor as you can. The only way you going to do that is seasoning. Now, a little less fire and I need a gorgeous plate. Always put in for the middle of the plate so you get your food right in the center and we’ll just garnish it a little bit of scallions for the green and a little bit of basil for the plate and we have a good one up here and I’m going to put a little color on it, too much green and not enough red. Reds and greens are important. Some little baby grape tomatoes and some little wonderful piñones and here we have it ladies and gentlemen, Chicken Marsala.