Alex Guarnaschelli's Favorite Chicken Dish Puts A Breaded Twist On A Saucy Classic

In today's health-conscious environment, you may see several recipes and cooking tips telling you how to give dishes a makeover to be a bit more diet-friendly. For example, you can use yogurt instead of mayonnaise to lighten up chicken salad, or put together an oil-based Italian-style potato salad instead of a fatty mayonnaise-based one. One of Alex Guarnaschelli's recipes, however, is bucking this trend. Rather than trying to create a lighter, more nutritious chicken marsala, she prefers to make her dish even heavier with the addition of breadcrumbs.

Unlike chicken (or veal, or eggplant) parmigiana, chicken marsala is typically made with sliced, unbreaded chicken cooked in a sauce. As per the name of the dish, the sauce is flavored with marsala wine. The dish is often prepared on the stovetop, but Guarnaschelli bakes her marsala-marinated, crumb-coated chicken in the oven instead, serving it sauceless. Her recipe also includes a few more atypical ingredients aside from the breadcrumbs, including dijon mustard, hot sauce, soy sauce, and Worcestershire sauce. Tasty as it may be — Food Network fans give Guarnaschelli 's recipe four out of five stars — but some reviewers found that it didn't meet their expectations of chicken marsala. In fact, a few disappointed diners mentioned that you could hardly taste the wine at all with so many other condiments in the mix.

By messing with a standard chicken marsala, is Alex Guarnaschelli really committing culinary heresy? Well, it depends on your tolerance for change, as well as what you feel constitutes a "classic" Italian recipe. Chicken marsala doesn't date back to the ancient Romans, after all, nor to the Italian Renaissance. Instead, it seems to have originated in 19^th-century Sicily, but may have been created to please the palates of French immigrants who settled there after the Napoleonic Wars. (Napoleon himself preferred his poulet spit-roasted.) Complicating the legend is the fact that marsala wine, while it is a product of Sicily, was extremely popular in England at the time, which leads us to wonder if there may have been some British influence at work, too.

No matter its provenance, one thing most food historians seem to agree on is that chicken marsala only reached the height of its popularity when it was adopted as a signature dish at many Italian-American restaurants. (The dish is nowhere near as prevalent in Italy.)  Today, chicken marsala is a favorite non-pasta item at Olive Garden. The chain's take isn't quite as out there as Guarnaschelli's since no breadcrumbs or soy sauce are involved, but its version is embellished with mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes, and cheeses, and comes with a side of mashed potatoes rather than the more typical spaghetti.