How to Pound Chicken Cutlets

Featured Pro: Curtis Stone
Category: Cooking
Time: 2:32


CURTIS STONE: For me, it’s all about choosing the right tool for the job. This one gets 50 percent better city fuel economy than any other SUV. What about the kitchen? There’s plenty of tools in there too. Come and I’ll show you a couple in this next GMC Trade Secret.

With just a little bit of preparation for some of your food, you can make your life so much easier when it comes to cooking. Look at this chicken cutlet. It’s the perfect thickness to throw onto a grill. If you wanted to put it through breadcrumbs or something like that, of course you could. But it’s super-quick to cook, and it’s going to cook really evenly.

So let me show you how to make one. What you need is a couple of pieces of plastic wrap. Now, what I’ve done is I’ve just folded it over a couple of times so it’s a little bit thicker than just one piece. Then you grab yourself your chicken breast and just pop it there in the middle. You cover it u with another piece of cling film or plastic wrap. And then you literally get this guy, which I call a meat bat. You can call it a mallet or a little meat hammer. It’s got a few different surfaces. This side’s flat. This side’s got little teeth, and that’s got little lines.

For this – if you were doing a steak and you wanted to tenderize it, you might use one with the teeth. But for this, you need the flat side. So you just get it and you just start. Think about your boss, if he’s been annoying you, when you do this, and just – now, of course, if you haven’t got the tenderizer or this guy, you can even use a rolling pin, okay. So you just need something, maybe even the bottom of a saucepan. You know, you could grab that and sort of – it would do the same job. Look at that. It’s a big meat, but I’ve just developed something here. That works. Also the rolling pin works, where you can just – basically anything that’s going to flatten that out.

So let’s see how we’re doing. Good. So we’ve got it nice and flat. But we want it a bit thinner. Now, of course, the thinner you hit it, the quicker it’s going to cook and the more even it’s going to be. So, you know, it depends if you want to do a salad and a really thin chicken cutlet or if you wanted to do something a bit meatier and serve it, you know, in breadcrumbs. Okay, lovely.

So we’ve got now a beautiful, big, thin chicken cutlet that’s ready to be spiced up with your favorite herbs and spices and thrown onto a grill or into a nonstick pan – super-easy and super-fast to cook.

I’m Curtis Stone, and that’s your GMC Trade Secret.