The Slicing Method For Perfectly Even Chicken Cutlets

If you've ever tried to pound an entire chicken breast, you know that the dead-end culinary technique usually doesn't go your way. When cooking delicious recipes like chicken parmesan or chicken piccata, you need to start with thin chicken breast cutlets. This ensures that the chicken will cook evenly and quickly, and it will have a nice crisp texture if it's breaded.

Whole boneless, skinless chicken breasts are too thick to achieve this goal, so to get the perfect-sized cutlet, you must take your knife to the chicken before you can take your mallet to it. The trouble is that cutting a chicken breast in half to create cutlets is tough. Even if you cut a chicken breast in half width-wise (almost as if you were butterflying it), you're bound to get one section that is thicker than the other. Again, the idea is to have cutlets that are all the same size and thickness before pounding them out. To achieve this, there's a knife trick that will help you succeed every time. To begin, you must cut the chicken into three even cutlets.

Due to the fact that whole boneless skinless chicken breasts are unevenly shaped, you cannot simply cut them in half to create cutlets, nor can you cut them into four pieces. Since there's a thick side and a thin side, four even cuts will have varying thicknesses. However, you'll have better luck by cutting the chicken breast into three equal cutlets. It might sound strange, but geometry is on your side. 

To do this, lay your boneless, skinless chicken breast on your cutting board. Then, with a clean, sharp knife, cut it in half width-wise. Visualize a chicken breast on the cutting board with the thick side to your left and the thin side to your right. Now, cut from across that north-south line, and then set the thin side piece aside. Take the thick side piece and slice it in half as if you were butterflying it, but cut all the way through. After that, you should be left with three equal pieces that you can pound into cutlets. With this tip, cutting a chicken breast into cutlets will no longer be a struggle.