Split Appetites

Easy chicken breading for the keto conscious, useable for stovetop and the oven. Be careful when broiling, because they burn fast and any exposed chicken fat on the foil could catch fire.

When cooking in the oven, I don’t use flour, merely coating the damp chicken (this helps the coating stick) into a mix of parmesan and garlic. When cooking stovetop, you can get a nice layer of crispy breading. I usually use a ratio of 1 tsp garlic to 2/3 cup shredded parmesan to 2 Tbsp grated to 2 Tbsp flour.

I have also tried it with taco seasoning, and that went very well. It was about 1/2 cup shredded parmesan cheese with 1/2 Tbsp taco seasoning. There is so much you can do with it, so many different flavors to try, combinations and individually. Ranch, cumin, and curry powder are a couple more examples.

Pictured below is 2/3 cup grated parmesan cheese, with 2 Tbsp shredded, 1.5 tsp garlic powder, 1 tsp cayenne pepper, and some salt & pepper. Having more shredded cheese as a coating will give it more of a crispier coating, but more grated helps with the consistency and additional flavors like cayenne and garlic.

This recipe works really well stovetop with some oil as well as nice and crispy in the oven. For broiling in the oven, it may take some time to get used to the way it works for you. 4-6 minutes each side tends to work well for me for about a half pound of chicken cut less than an inch thick, not resting before cooking, only 3 minutes each side for cooking tiny pieces or when cooking only 1 at a time. I generally broil on the second rung down in the oven for chicken. It will become thick and gritty if you overcook it, so be sure not to leave it too long.

For small bite-sized chunks of chicken and thin cuts (chicken breast cut in half height-wise), you can simply bread it and use broil to cook it, flipping halfway through. For full breasts, you would have to cook it for 4-7 minutes at 400-450 degrees before switching to broil, again flipping it for both sets of cooking. This allows it to have the crispy outside and still cooking it through. Remove it from its cooking platform as soon as you can after it’s done cooking or it could get soggy (this applies to all instances of cooking chicken this way, not just whole breasts).

The amount of breading is completely dependent on the size of the pieces, so only use the recipe as a reference. Larger pieces of meat require less breading than small pieces of the same amount of chicken. Cook time too varies widely from the size of the chicken. It’s mostly the thickness, but the rest of the size is a bit important too. How many you are cooking affects it a bit, but only to a certain point. Unless it’s a really thick cut of chicken, when it is nice and crispy on both outsides, it should be cooked all the way through. Be sure to test by cutting open the largest piece until you can confirm this method works for the thickness you use.

You can also use egg and heavy whipping cream to coat the chicken before you dredge it in your flour and cheese mixture. Or even coat it in pork rinds or ground lupin. You can even skip the coating and cook it straight on the pan with a bit of butter or oil, but you will probably not get the nice crust you are looking for. Just tossing chunked chicken in a little bit of parmesan will help.

These are just a few ways you can shape your chicken as you prepare it. Small chunks for filling biscuits or eating as popcorn chicken. Larger chunks for pizza toppings or putting in pasta or even as chicken nuggets. Large chunks for chicken pockets and as a main meal piece, such as chicken parmesan. The strips are for either eating as chicken strips, or my personal favorite, in wraps. Note that the smaller ones are easy to use for any chicken you may have, whereas the larger pieces might leave left over chunks. So start with the larger or most structure dependent pieces, like strips, then move through to smaller pieces if you have use for them.