8 Mistakes Everyone Makes With Chicken Marsala, According To A Chef

Chicken marsala is a classic Italian-American dish featuring tender chicken cutlets in a rich, savory mushroom and marsala wine sauce. Beloved for its balance of sweet and savory flavors, it's a versatile dish elegant enough to prepare for my personal chef clients for a weeknight meal or a dinner party. It's one of my favorite dishes to teach in cooking classes because it's chock full of foundational culinary techniques.

To start, boneless, skinless chicken breasts are butterflied or pounded thin and seared until golden brown. The pan is then deglazed with marsala wine, a fortified wine from the Marsala region of Sicily to create the dish's signature sauce. Its distinct flavor is due in part to the brandy that is typically added to it. The sauce transforms run of the mill chicken breasts into a dish that's both comforting and refined. As fancy as it may sound, chicken marsala is surprisingly easy to make at home — if you can avoid a few common mistakes.

Chicken marsala is a variation of Italian scallopini, which means thin pieces of meat, usually pork, veal or chicken. Those pieces are seasoned, dredged lightly in flour, seared and simmered with a pan sauce. The key to perfect scallopini is starting with the thinnest pieces of chicken. Thinner pieces will cook quickly and evenly. Boneless, skinless chicken breasts are typically thick on one end and thinner on the other, making it difficult to cook both ends just right. It's easy to overcook the thin end while waiting for the larger side to cook completely.

Fortunately, it's also easy to turn your chicken breasts into scallopini for your chicken marsala. You have the option of cutting them in half horizontally, also known as butterflying, or using a meat mallet to pound them thin. Pounding your chicken breasts is a simple trick that makes the breasts more tender and promotes even cooking. Some recipes even recommend using both techniques to ensure your breasts are thin enough. To thin out your chicken breasts, place one in a plastic, resealable bag. Squeeze out any extra air and use the flat side of a meat mallet to pound it to your desired thinness.

Dredging your chicken scaloppini in flour is a key step in making chicken marsala. If you don't know what it means to dredge, it's simply the process of lightly coating food in flour. It's the dredge that helps create a golden crust on the chicken breasts. It can also help prevent seared chicken from sticking to the pan and when the chicken is added back to the pan with the sauce, the flour will help thicken it.

Dredging may sound a lot like breading, but they're not the same. Dredging is actually the first step in the breading process. For breading, foods are dredged in flour followed by a dip in a liquid, usually eggs or milk, and then coated in breadcrumbs. When you skip the dredge, you run the risk of having chicken breasts that don't have the golden brown crust and color that chicken marsala is known for. You may also end up with a sauce that's thinner than it should be without that added bit of flour from the dredge to help thicken it.

One of the reasons I love teaching beginning cooks how to make chicken marsala is because the skills you need to prepare it well, like searing, can be applied to many other recipes. Searing is a basic cooking technique that on the surface seems simple to execute. Place food in a pan and cook it until it's brown, but there are a number of seemingly insignificant details involved that if ignored or not done properly can lead to less than stellar results.

Searing causes the natural sugars present in the chicken to caramelize. Also known as the Maillard reaction, the caramelization creates a rich, savory taste in the chicken. The key to this is making sure your pan is nice and hot. Without enough heat, the chicken won't brown or caramelize. You should also avoid overcrowding your pan. Adding too much food to a pan at once lowers its temperature and if food is placed too closely together it will steam instead of sear. To avoid the biggest mistake you're making when searing chicken, let it cook for several minutes without moving or flipping it once it's in the pan. Moving the chicken too frequently will interrupt the searing process.

Mushrooms add a rich, umami flavor to chicken marsala in addition to a hearty texture. When it comes to the texture of the sauce the last thing you want to experience is a mystery crunch that comes along with using dirty mushrooms. Mushrooms are magnets for dirt and soil, which will end up in your final dish, making it crunchy, if they're not cleaned properly.

To clean mushrooms, avoid submerging them in water, which might be your first instinct if yours are particularly dirty. Mushrooms absorb moisture like a sponge and if they're wet when you add them to your pan they won't cook properly. You'll end up with steamed mushrooms, which will be too soft and mushy, instead of sautéed mushrooms that retain their texture and bite. The best way to clean mushrooms will depend on how dirty they are. For those with just a little dirt, wipe them clean with a damp paper towel. Mushrooms that are extra dirty can be rinsed clean. There are some who advise against rinsing mushrooms, but the idea that mushrooms shouldn't be rinsed under any circumstances is the biggest misconception about cleaning them. You can avoid water logging them by rinsing them quickly and patting them dry immediately before cooking them.

Overcrowding your pans while you cook is never a good thing. No matter what you're cooking, a crowded pan will almost certainly lead to less than desirable results. This is especially true when you're cooking mushrooms. The same way we don't want to overcrowd the pan when we sear the chicken, we don't want to repeat this same mistake with our mushrooms.

Overcrowding your pan with mushrooms is the biggest mistake you can make when sautéing them. Mushrooms need high heat and lots of space to sauté properly. Choose a pan large enough to accommodate all of your mushrooms without them being piled on top of each other. To get the best sautéed mushrooms they should be spread out in an even layer with enough room in between them to allow the hot air to circulate freely around them. Mushrooms have a high water content, about 92%, that they release when they're cooked. If your 'shrooms are too close together, that moisture will create steam, which will give them a soft, soggy texture.

Garlic is a popular allium due to its trademark flavor it imparts to everything it's added to. Whether you're whipping up a simple garlic butter or a batch of creamy garlic butter noodles, just about everything is made better with the addition of garlic as long as you don't burn it. Most cooking mistakes can be corrected but the bitter taste of burnt garlic will give your marsala sauce cannot be fixed. Unfortunately, despite its big, bold flavor, garlic is relatively fragile when it comes to heat. It browns and burns easily and quickly, often before you even realize it.

To avoid burning the garlic and ruining your marsala sauce, pay close attention to the temperature of your pan. When cooking with garlic, reduce the heat in your pan before adding it. You can turn it back up once the garlic's settled in but this can help prevent burning, especially if you're working with finely chopped or minced garlic whose smaller pieces will burn faster than others.

Adding the marsala and chicken broth to your pan isn't enough to create a flavorful marsala sauce. To create the best tasting sauce, you'll need to deglaze your pan. Deglazing is the process of adding a liquid to your pan after you've seared your protein. Once the marsala 's in the pan grab a wooden spoon or silicone spatula and drag it gently across the bottom of the pan. This will release the tiny bits of food that have gathered there. Those bits of food, called fond, will dissolve, adding their savory flavor to the sauce.

Once you've taken advantage of the flavor goldmine on the bottom of the pan, there's one additional step in the deglazing process you should take on your path to a delicious marsala sauce. You have to simmer the sauce until it reduces by about half. When the sauce reduces, the water it contains evaporates, leaving behind the most flavorful parts. Though you'll end up with less in the pan than when you started, the sauce that remains will have a much more intense flavor.

The sauce is what makes chicken marsala so delicious. Sure, the chicken is tasty, but it's the sauce that really elevates the dish, and getting the texture wrong can ruin it. If your sauce is too thick or thin it won't coat the chicken properly or produce the mouthfeel you're used to. Marsala sauce is known for being smooth and velvety with a rich, slightly thickened texture. The ultimate texture you want for marsala sauce is the same as with any pan sauce. It should be thick enough that when you run a spoon through it, the sauce should cling to the back of the spoon. At this consistency, it will also be better able to cling to the chicken.

Both the flour used to dredge the chicken and reducing the sauce will contribute to its thicker consistency, but some recipes recommend adding a bit of heavy cream to create the ideal texture. Though it's not traditional, you can also thicken marsala sauce by adding mascarpone cheese to the sauce. To finish the sauce, whisk in a couple pats of butter for sheen and you'll be ready to enjoy your chicken marsala.