I Tried Alton Brown’s and Giada De Laurentiis’ Chicken Piccata Recipes—There’s a Clear Winner

My monthly meal plan includes one day each week that’s dedicated to quick-cooking, family-friendly chicken dinners. I usually schedule those meals for busy days when I could use a win in the kitchen (looking at you, Monday).

On those days, I prioritize recipes I can make in under an hour with ingredients I usually have on hand and that my kids will eat, which means we end up eating a lot of schnitzel and other cutlet-based dishes like balsamic chicken and chicken piccata.

To that end, I’m on a mission to find the best recipe for chicken piccata—one I can commit to memory and make time and time again. That’s what led me to compare popular chicken piccata recipes from Giada De Laurentiis and Alton Brown. Here’s what I discovered when I tested the two recipes side by side.

Giada De Laurentiis’ Chicken Piccata

In her recipe for chicken piccata, Giada De Laurentiis presents a simple, unfussy version of the Italian American classic. It delivers on the lemony-buttery flavors the dish is known for, with a nice, sharp contrast from the capers. Unsurprisingly, it is a quintessential version of the dish—exactly the kind of chicken piccata you’d find if you looked it up in the dictionary.

De Laurentiis’ chicken piccata comes together in under 40 minutes with just seven ingredients (not including oil, salt, and pepper), making it a great choice for a quick family dinner. Other recipes for chicken piccata I’ve tried have called for wine (as does Alton Brown’s, which we’ll get to in a sec), so I was curious when I saw that it’s not in De Laurentiis’ recipe.

I wondered if using just stock would make the sauce taste a little bland, but the inclusion of a third of a cup of lemon juice keeps the sauce bright and perfectly acidic, amplified even more by the briny capers.

Alton Brown’s Chicken Piccata

Alton Brown’s chicken piccata deviates from my vision of the dish by including sliced button mushrooms. Brown is by no means the first person to do this, and recently, a crop of mushroom piccata recipes that skip the chicken altogether have been popping up, but his was the first version to include mushrooms that I’ve tried.

I loved the mushrooms so much that I may never go back to a mushroom-less version. They bulked up the dish without feeling superfluous, resulting in a more filling chicken piccata. It’s a smart way to stretch the meal to serve a few more people or provide leftovers.

Also, by using chicken thighs instead of breasts, Brown found a way to deepen the flavors of the dish. I still prefer chicken breasts for piccata, but I appreciated the way the richer thighs balanced the tangy sauce.

Speaking of chicken thighs, I learned a new technique for pounding the chicken for this dish. After seasoning raw chicken thighs with salt and pepper, Brown advises cooks to pound them with a meat mallet in a zip-top bag of flour. Usually, I pound chicken between two pieces of parchment or plastic wrap and then dredge them, but I liked the way this saved a step and created a nice crust on the outside of the chicken.

That said, my biggest quibble with Brown’s recipe was in the method. Brown advises using a very specific pan—an “11-inch straight-sided sauté pan with a tight-fitting lid”—which is probably nice to have but feels unnecessary, as does the instruction to remove and return the chicken to the pan not once but twice.

The dealbreaker was the introduction of raw flour and butter to thicken the sauce at the end. This is called a beurre manié in French, and it’s a somewhat antiquated French technique that you don’t see often because it’s… not great. It’s also superfluous; by timing the recipe a little differently, you can thicken the sauce without the need for extra flour and butter.

The Winner: Giada De Laurentiis’ Chicken Piccata

By this point, you can probably tell which chicken piccata won me over. For its simplicity and brightness, the win goes to GIada De Laurentiis’ recipe. This is the version that I’ll store in the Rolodex of my mind and whip out whenever I’m in the mood for piccata.

But now, thanks to Alton Brown, I’ll pound and dredge the chicken at the same time in a zip-top bag, using the method I learned from his recipe, and I’ll add a heap of mushrooms to the dish for extra heft.