Throwdown 1 Results

Here are the notes from last night’s Throwdown Chicken Marsala.  It went pretty well, I had fun, and I certainly learned a lot.  The end result was ok but not great, so I don’t necessarily recommend following this recipe yet.  We’ll tweak things in the coming months and revise, so be patient.

So we started off getting our mise en place, which is French for get all your shit together before you start cooking.  Or something like that.  Here’s what it looked like.  All good stuff: real chicken, fresh mushrooms and parsley, a little cream and butter, and imported Marsala wine, which I’m just sure is better than the cheap cooking wine version.  After all, it costs more.

Here we are prepping the ingredients.  Thinly slice 8 oz. fresh mushrooms and 2 green onions, and mince up a handful (maybe 2 Tbsp) fresh parsley.

Then the chicken needed to be flattened to about ¼ inch thick.  We tried two ways: slicing longitudinally into two sections, or placing between plastic wrap and hammering with a meat mallet.  Both seemed serviceable, but neither did a great job.  Slicing was difficult and I kinda shredded one of the pieces.  Pounding is noisy and it never seems that the thick part gets fully flattened out.  This is something we need to look into for the future versions.

Next, the chicken was dredged in ½ cup of flour with about a ½ tsp of salt, a few grinds of black pepper, and ½ tsp of dry thyme.  This was way more flour than we needed for two chicken breasts, and I’m not sure we could taste the spices.  Probably a proportion thing.

The chicken got cooked in a big sauté pan (ours is 12” but it could probably have been done in a 10”).  A combo of 1Tbsp butter and 1 Tbsp olive oil were melted together and the floured chickens were cooked for about 2 to 3 minutes per side.  Then we pulled the chicken out, put them on a plate and put foil over to retain the heat.

The pan was looking a little dry, so we added maybe another Tbsp of olive oil and sautéed the mushrooms until they let off most of their liquid, and looked awesomely soft and buttery, probably about 5 minutes.  Added the onions, sautéed for a minute more, and deglazed the pan with ½ cup of the Marsala, making sure to scrape up any of the browned bits into the liquid.  Oh, sometime about now we started the pasta cooking.

Once the pan was deglazed, we added ¼ cup chicken broth and ¼ cup heavy cream in an attempt to thicken the sauce.  It looked something like this.

Unfortunately, cream alone didn’t really do much to thicken, even as we simmered for quite some time.  After about 5 to 7 minutes, we gave in and added ½ tsp of corn starch, dissolved in just a little chicken broth.  Once we poured that in, presto!  The sauce thickened instantly.  So the thickening process is another thing for us to look into.

We plated with perhaps a bit much pasta, placed the chicken on top, and poured the sauce over.  It looked like this, and smelled awesome!  I love the aroma of Marsala wine, and this one didn’t disappoint.

The taste wasn’t quite as stimulating, though.  The sauce didn’t quite have enough of the distinct Marsala flavor, and tasted like a generic cream sauce.  The chicken pieces that were thin enough ended up being pretty tasty, but might have needed a little more crispness to the outside.  All in all, it was a good dinner, and I’m sure it would have knocked my socks off a few years ago.  But it still needs work, which is fine, and actually kinda cool.  Now I get to work on revising my recipe, fine-tuning it until we finally reach the perfect Chicken Marsala.  It might take a while, but we’ll get there!

And with April almost over, it's time to look forward to next month's Throwdown.  What will it be?  I don't know yet, but I'm sure we'll come up with something.  Maybe you have an idea?