The Non-Traditional (But Easy) Method For Making Chicken Parmesan

Chicken parmesan, according to some polls, may be one of the most popular chicken restaurant dishes of all time – or at least of this time. Washington Capitals team captain Alex Ovechkin is a big fan, as are Peyton Manning, Paul Rudd, and millions of other not-so-famous names. Restaurant popularity aside, though, it's not such a difficult dish to make at home, especially if you're not averse to using shortcuts like the TikTok-trendy one of using chicken tenders baked in the air fryer.

If you're feeling somewhat ambitious, you can make your chicken parmesan with real chicken tenders that you coat and cook yourself, since such thin strips of meat don't take much time. You can also be super-lazy and use pre-breaded frozen chicken tenders or even nuggets. Bake the chicken in your air fryer (or oven, if you don't have one) and then top it with mozzarella and marinara sauce (we're partial to the Carbone brand, if you're not up to making your own). Heat the chicken for a few more minutes until the sauce is warm and the cheese has melted, then you'll have a pretty passable parmesan. You could even slap the saucy, cheesy tenders inside a hamburger bun to make a copycat Burger King Italian Chicken Sandwich.

If you're even the slightest bit bothered by making things the non-traditional way and you want an authentically Italian recipe, then you'll need to pass on chicken parmesan altogether. Even if you call it pollo alla parmigiana using your most Giada De Laurentiis-like enunciation, chicken parmesan is about as Italian as apple pie (or torta di mele). In Italy, its predecessor was made with eggplant but it wasn't until immigrants arrived in the land of opportunity and cheap meat that they started experimenting with better sources of protein. (Eggplant doesn't have much of the stuff.) Meat-based parmesans also tend to be less mushy than the eggplant kind.

But what about veal parmesan? Where does that dish fit into the parmesan family? Unlike chicken, it does seem to have Italian roots and may have evolved from an ancient Roman recipe called cotoletta alla Milanese. (This dish was marinara-less, since tomatoes were unknown in Europe until the 16th century.) Initially, veal parmesan may have been more popular than chicken in the U.S. because veal was actually less expensive than chicken during the first part of the 20^th century. Not only is it much, much pricier these days, but it's a lot less popular because consuming cute baby animals (other than lamb) has long since gone out of style. That leaves chicken, perhaps the least traditional of the parmesans, as the one upholding the family honor, even if you do make it with frozen tenders and sauce from a jar.