Chicken Parmesan

Variations

• Eggplant parmesan: Use eggplant instead of chicken (vegetarian).
• Chicken parm sandwich: Tuck it into a ciabatta, sub-style.
• Over pasta: Serve on spaghetti or rigatoni as one plate.
• Spicy: Add red pepper flakes to the sauce.

Tips

• Milanesa writes this dish out and names the way it fails. Its napolitana "spreads tomato sauce over a crust that was fried crisp minutes earlier, lays ham and mozzarella on top and puts the whole thing back under a grill" — and then: "a coating that was only resting on the meat lifts off in one sheet when it is sauced and reheated, and what arrives at the table is bread on top and bare meat underneath." So the thing that decides this plate is adhesion, and it is decided before the frying. Milanesa presses the meat firmly into the crumbs for exactly that, and pounding the cutlet flat first is the other half of it — an even face gives the coating one continuous surface to hold on to instead of a row of high points.
• "Don't drown it" is a clock rather than a caution. Deep frying sorts what a fried surface can do about meeting something wet, and the answers run from buying time before the sauce arrives to giving the dial up altogether. Chilaquiles sets the clock deliberately at one to two minutes and calls that the method; nachos puts a barrier in instead — "melted fat is what a chip's surface can hide behind". This dish takes both at once: the sauce is spooned over each cutlet rather than poured round it, and the cheese goes on top of the sauce, so what is wet is a measured amount with fat above it.
• The mozzarella is the barrier and the extra water in the same slice. Dairy and heat decides the melt by moisture, and fresh mozzarella sits at the wet end of that scale — which is where the pull comes from and also what lands on the crust. Mozzarella's own page gives the answer it uses for a pizza: "slice it and drain it in a sieve for 30 minutes first." Those thirty minutes cost nothing here either.
• This crust is a surface, not a container, and the three cutlets around it mark out the axis. Tonkatsu presses coarse panko on hard for a thick shell; schnitzel refuses to press at all so steam off the meat lifts the crumb clear into a dome; chicken Kyiv needs the crust to hold butter in and calls the other three "meat beaten flat, crumbed and fried" with "nothing inside". A dome is the last thing wanted here, since every void under the coating is somewhere sauce can get, and there is nothing inside to keep in — only something heavy sitting on top.
• Pound the chicken thin so it cooks evenly and stays tender.
• Mixing Parmesan into the crumbs boosts the flavor.
• Don't drown it in sauce or the crust turns soggy.
• Fry it crisp first, then only a short bake — too long and it goes soft.
• Fresh mozzarella gives the best cheese pull.