How To Make A Chicken Schnitzel

I'm going to show you how to make chicken schnitzel which is basically breaded escallops of chicken, flattened out, pan fried. The first thing I'm going to do over here is I've got my chicken breast and I'm going to cut it just across so I end up with two pieces of chicken. You can start with one whole one and flatten that out but it does make it very large and it can be hard to fit them in the pan.

So I'm going to do two separate pieces. They're slightly more manageable. So I put a bit of cling film over my surface here, and I'm going to place my pieces of chicken onto my cling film.

And then, I'm going to put another piece of cling film over the top. What I'm going to do now is use a rolling pin to flatten out the chicken. Now, obviously, you have to use enough force to flatten it, but if you hit it too hard, you will just break it into pieces.

Just with quite controlled bits, we want it nice and thin, maybe half a centimeter at most. The next thing we're going to do now that we have our chicken quite flat is we're going to peel back the top layer and do something called panning it. That's when you put it in flour, eggs and breadcrumbs.

This chicken is thin and quite delicate and you want to lift it quite carefully, otherwise bits might break off. I'm just going to coat that in flour, just press that down. Turn it over.

Make sure you've got the whole thing all covered in seasoned flour. Then, it goes into the egg, and finally onto our breadcrumbs. These breadcrumbs I made myself, they're just tasty breadcrumbs.

So I've got my schnitzels ready to go. My pan is heating up. What I'm going to do is put in some sunflower oil, quite a bit actually.

Don't be shy on it because you don't want it to burn on a dry pan. The secret with the oil is to get it hot enough so it doesn't make your breadcrumbs really greasy, but not get it too hot because you don't want it to burn. So, we're just going to leave it for a second.

You certainly don't want it at a smoking heat, like you would with searing meat, but you don't want it going straight into cold oil. We're just going to wait, maybe 20-30 seconds. You can always test it by just getting a few little breadcrumbs, dropping them into the oil.

It's not quite there yet. You want to see just a few little bubbles and a bit of sizzle, but you don't want it to be too hot. I'm going to take my chicken schnitzel, pop it into my pan, pop that in on this side.

Don't move them. Give them a minute and a half on each side. They're so thin, that should be cooked all the way through.

We just want to get the breadcrumbs nice and golden. And, obviously, cook the chicken. I've just turned it over, as you can see, that's looking perfect.

We're getting a slight bit of color around the edges. Obviously, we don't have dark breadcrumbs ready quite yet, but we're getting a bit of golden brown. Any further than that and it's going to be burned, so really keep an eye on that.

These things can turn in seconds, so do not let your pan get too hot. It's sizzling quite a lot at the moment, but I've really got an eye on it and it's not actually on very high. You don't have to move it too much.

You don't want to keep turning it over. You just want to do it one side, turn over, other side, out, three or four minutes maximum. I'm going to take these out now.

They've literally had three minutes. We've got that lovely, crispy golden coating. The chicken is very thin, so that's cooked in just a minute or two.

And there you go. That's how to cook chicken schnitzel. I'm going to serve my schnitzel with a lovely creamy mushroom sauce.

If you'd like to know how to cook it, just have a look at my video, How to Make Creamy Mushroom Sauce.
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