Family-style weeknight chicken and gravy but made with fried chicken cutlets and a rich and creamy herbed country gravy. Thinly sliced chicken cutlets dredged and shallow fried until golden and crispy served with a homemade white country gravy that’s infused with fresh thyme and rosemary spooned generously over those golden and delicious crispy cutlets.
This is my version of a Southern/ American inspired chicken and gravy dinner. This is a super popular weeknight staple dinner that’s been transformed a little bit more into my style to make it comforting, creamy, and crunchy. All elements I love to have in each meal.
In order to make the perfect chicken cutlets you take boneless and skinless chicken breasts and you press down on top of the breast with your hand to secure it on your cutting board. Then you take a sharp knife and run it across the chicken to slice it into 1 even clean stroke. It’s almost like butterflying except you are cutting horizontally all the way across to have thinner pieces of chicken. Of course you can pound them down really excessively to make it super thin, but the proper way is also very budget cautious. So 1 piece of chicken breast can give you up to 3 cutlets. This is a great way to stretch out your food. The rest is making a simple dry dredge and using some of that mixture into a wet dredge with cold water. Now you take your cutlets dip them in the wet and then coat them with the dry to create that crispy crunchy exterior. I chose to shallow fry because it’s less wasteful and the chicken pieces are very thin so they are easy to fry this way.
Country gravy is an American white gravy often seen poured over chicken, fried chicken or country fried steak. Its made how you typically start a simple gravy by making a roux with melted butter and flour, whisking until it thickens and turns brown. From there instead of pan drippings, or beef broth you use milk to thicken it into a silky smooth sauce. Of course I wanted a little bit of a beef flavor so I added a cube of beef bouillon, if I had drippings I would have added that too with the milk. Next time I guess.. and then once it reached the texture that I liked, I seasoned it with salt, a generous amount of pepper, fresh thyme, and rosemary. I find the milk really eliminates a lot of flavor and leaves it kind of bland so its important to season and probably season a lot.
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