Chicken piccata is one of those recipes that can turn someone’s day around. The savory-ness from the chicken braising in this lemon butter sauce just warms the soul. It’s an easy one pot skillet recipe that cooks up like a 4 hour recipe. The simplest recipes are the best recipes. Start by taking chicken cutlets seasoning them up and dredging them in flouring. The flour does the work to not only brown the chicken better, but also is our sauce thickener when we’re finishing the sauce. Make the pan sauce with some fresh garlic, a sploosh of white wine, dash of capers and a squeeze of lemon. Submerge the chicken back into the pan to coat it in the yummy sauce. The chicken comes out more tender and flavorful than you can imagine.

Let’s start with my secret to the best chicken breast recipes. Chicken breasts are typically thick at one end and taper thinner at the other, so what do we do? We tenderize it! Use a meat mallet, a rolling pin, a wine bottle to a plastic wrap covered piece of chicken and go to town gently evening out the breast. This breaks down the muscle tissue and creates pockets of juiciness all over the chicken.

Browning the chicken doesn’t get any better than a quick coat in flour. It’s a staple of any good chicken recipe that you then use a pan sauce with, but even no pan sauce. I always say you get one good side for browned chicken and that’s the first side that hits the pan. The pan is very hot and the chicken is freshly dried from the flour. That’s why if you’re not using flour it’s important to pat dry that first side. It removes the excess moisture from the surface allowing more contact with the chicken in the pan. The water prevents the chicken from touching the pan if you can believe it.

Let’s talk about the pan sauce. You don’t need many ingredients, let alone fancy ones. Chicken piccata is one of those recipes that uses wine as a pan liquid, but you can very much use water. A pan sauce’s foundation is to just remove the bits from the bottom of the pan that stuck and create a sauce. If we just added water, the pan sauce would taste like chicken stock. We add butter, we roast garlic in the butter, then we deglaze the pan with a liquid to lift that flavor into a pool of sauce. Reduce it a little, add butter, and watch the sauce form.

A perfect date night recipe that you can be proud of and that will get your bonus stars. If you haven’t tried this before PLEASE do yourself a favor.