Chef Curtiss: a satisfying winter dish to impress your friends

This winter, "we're gonna put on some pounds!" said Chef Curtiss Hemm.

Todd Moe and Chef Curtiss HemmChef Curtiss: a satisfying winter dish to impress your friends

Chef Curtiss Hemm's Chicken Saltimbocca.  Photo provided
Chef Curtiss Hemm's Chicken Saltimbocca. Photo provided

Every month, Chef Curtiss brings listeners a new seasonal recipe. He owns the Carriage House Cooking School in Peru, NY, and is the executive chef at The View Restaurant at the Mirror Lake Inn Resort and Spa in Lake Placid.

He's got a recipe for comfort food that makes for a simple weeknight meal or a fancy weekend meal with friends: Chicken Saltimbocca.  It’s chicken and herbs and spices and cheese!  Curtiss says it’s one of his favorite meals.

CHEF CURISS HEMM: I got my first taste of it at Anthony's in Plattsburgh, as a young cook. I've done a lot of research on Roman cuisine over the years.

TODD MOE: Let's walk through the recipe, then Curtiss: not a lot of ingredients, but you said there's kind of a twist to this, or it's all in the technique.

CHEF CURTISS: It is. The basic of saltimbocca is there's a piece of meat that covers a large part of a plate, and you get that coverage by pounding and denaturing physically, the meat itself. So you're going to pound it to a unified thickness, so it's the same thickness across the entire piece of meat, same as if you're using a piece of salmon or whatnot.

We're using chicken breast here, so generally what I do is I take a chicken breast, and I cut it in half across the middle lengthwise. I lay it down flat, and then there's one end that comes comes to a point and there's a rounded end. And what I do is I take my knife parallel to the board, and I cut that in half, then I flip that over, and I pound those two pieces out. So they're maybe about a quarter inch thick, because what you want is something that's going to cook quickly.

What happens when you pound that out, you denature the protein structure, and you actually rupture it, and you break open those long chains of protein, those strands that make up the grain of the fiber of the meat. That right there tenderizes the food, I take the chicken breast, the salt, pepper, the chopped sage, the garlic and red pepper flakes, and I kind of rub that all over the chicken.

"I take the salt, pepper, the chopped sage, the garlic and red pepper flakes, and I kind of rub that all over the chicken."

There's a couple ways you can cook the chicken, if you wanted to grill it in a grill pan or on a grill, you could do that. I have lots of friends that grill in the wintertime. I do as well. This is a great technique to use, because you're going to have that as the oils and the juices drip, they're going to kiss the flame and that's going to sizzle and that's going to put flavor on the chicken as well. You can do it in a saute pan if you wanted to. If you wanted to further tenderize that you could coat that chicken scallopini and a little bit of flour or even if you remember Wondra flour? Have you heard of Wondra flour? That blue kind of round cylinder flour that you find in the grocery store. That's a dried barley and rice mixture. It's already toasted and cooked in the ground super fine. It promotes a pretty crisp exterior. A lot of times, we'll use those on French fries.

Regardless, basically, you just take a pan, you put it over medium high heat, and you cook the chicken one side first. Try to get a little color if you can. If not, it's not the end of the world. Then you take that out. It's pretty simple. After that, once it's, two-thirds of the way cooked, you take it out, you lay those flat. You top it with the sage leaves, and the cheese and then you brown all of that under a broiler or in a hot oven.

That's pretty much it! It is super, super simple. If you wanted to deglaze the pan with a little bit of chicken stock, you could do that as well and get a little bit of a brown sauce with that.

"I have lots of friends that grill in the wintertime. This is a great technique to use, because as the oils and the juices drip, they're going to kiss the flame and that's going to sizzle and that's going to put flavor on the chicken."

 With the sage leaves and getting them crisp, and then they get broiled at the end. That just brings out the flavor, right? That just really enhances the sage flavor. You're releasing the oils, sage leaves, and it kind of shares its personality more generously, I suppose, is a way to put it with the rest of the dish.

And a little bit of red pepper if you want a little bit of a bite. I like the bite but Bridget she can't handle the bite anymore. So we go very mildly or I just omit it a lot of times, but if it's something that I do in the Carriage House for a class or something, I put the red pepper flakes in there.

TODD: What would you serve this with? Some greens, some spinach or some asparagus or how would you serve with us?

CHEF CURTISS: I'm gonna be honest, I like grits!

TODD: Oh, really?

CHEF CURTISS: I do. I keep instinct grids on hand all the time, especially in the winter time and you can buy the packet. It's like an oatmeal packet. Or you can buy the cylinder tubes of instinct grits. Use chicken stock, a little bit of Fontina cheese with the grits. It's almost like a polenta. The grits have just kind of a creamier flavor than the polenta. And I think the polenta is just kind of predictable in that sense. I think they're great!

You could do a green salad. Arugula with simple extra virgin olive oil. Some shaved Parmesan cheese, salt and pepper and a little bit of lemon juice is a fantastic accompaniment to this. Arugula has a lot of health benefits, too. It's an anti-estrogen food. There's a lot of pluses to arugula; it's a bitter green and the more bitter the green, the healthier it is for you.

TODD: Well listen, Curtiss. Thank you! Great comfort food recipe for January here, coming off the holidays. Let's get back to the kitchen.

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