I've Been Making This Easy Ina Garten Chicken Recipe for Years—It's So Good

If you love crispy chicken cutlets but are afraid of frying, Ina Garten's Parmesan Chicken is the perfect recipe for you. This recipe uses just a handful of basic ingredients and will give you golden brown, deliciously seasoned, and juicy chicken in about 30 minutes.

You can follow Ina’s lead and make a bright and crunchy salad to go on top, use these cutlets to make everything from classic chicken Parm (just add tomato sauce and mozzarella), or put them on challah buns with a little special sauce and turn them into some of the best chicken sandwiches you’ve ever eaten. Here’s everything you need to know about this classic Ina recipe.

How To Make Ina Garten’s Parmesan Chicken

Pretty much all crispy chicken recipes follow a culinary technique called “standard breading procedure”. This means the chicken gets coated in flour, dunked into an egg mixture, and then coated with a breadcrumb coating.

Ina’s recipe is not wildly different, but she does make use of smart seasoning in these steps: The flour gets seasoned generously with two teaspoons of salt and a teaspoon of freshly cracked black pepper, while the final coating gets seasoned breadcrumbs instead of plain and added Parmesan cheese to amp up the flavor. The result is a very tasty coating that also seasons the chicken underneath. 

What makes Ina’s Parmesan Chicken so weeknight friendly is that it isn’t deep fried—she calls for barely enough oil to call her recipe pan-fried—just a tablespoon each of olive oil and butter for each chicken breast. This means way less splatter from the pan, cutting down on mess and burns, too. It’s still plenty of fat for a very crispy chicken cutlet that is gorgeously browned, and because it's quick-cooking, the chicken stays juicy.

My Tips for Making Ina’s Parmesan Chicken

I make Ina’s Parmesan chicken a few times a month and either the recipe gets better or I’ve just perfected it in my own kitchen. Here are a few things I’ve learned from making it over the years.

Buy smaller chicken breasts or butterfly large ones. Ina’s recipe calls for six chicken breasts that get pounded into 1/4-inch thin cutlets. Even the organic chicken breasts at my grocery store are close to half a pound each, meaning they take ages to pound thin. If you can find chicken breasts that are smaller, say five to six ounces each, use those and get six. But if you’re buying regular grocery store chicken breasts, three breasts in the eight to nine-ounce range can be split in half and easily pounded to the right thickness. Or purchase chicken cutlets.

Use extra large eggs or an extra egg. Ina loves some extra-large eggs! Two extra-large eggs are just enough to cover six chicken cutlets, but two standard large eggs will not. Use three large eggs plus the water for the egg wash step, and you’ll have enough to coat all the chicken.

Ina gets a lot of credit for her decadent recipes and the dishes that take all day to cook, but her Parmesan chicken deserves a spot on your weeknight dinner roster.

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