Foolproof Chicken Cordon Bleu

I was leafing through my plethora of cookbooks and magazines and decided it was time to do some purging of the magazines. My method: I look through one, tear out any recipes I'm interested in trying and toss the rest. The idea is I will try said recipe and either file it in my recipe binder or toss it, depending on how it turns out. Great. Now I have a pile of loose magazine pages.

So this week I've started to cook through those pages. First up: Foolproof Chicken Cordon Bleu courtesy of Cook's Country (April/May 2010)

The recipe looked fairly simple and like it might be a good take on the traditional dish.

To start: prep the coating.

Preheat oven to 450 degrees
25 Ritz crackers (about 3/4 sleeve)
4 slices hearty white sandwich bread, torn into pieces
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted

Here is where having a food processor is key. I took 25 Ritz crackers (I used whole wheat Ritz - I think the key here is to be sure to avoid the low sodium which would lessen the flavor) and the 4 slices of bread (we don't have white, let alone hearty white so I used the 12 grain whole wheat we had on hand). Pulsed it until it looks like soft, fluffy breadcrumbs. Then drizzle the melted butter in and pulse it to blend it evenly through.

Put the crumbs on a cookie sheet and on the lower mid oven rack. Toast them for about 5-6 minutes, stirring them up a little mid-way through. They will become golden in color (harder to tell when you use the whole wheat but you can tell) and you'll be able to smell them.

Set aside in a shallow dish for later. (If you are making the entire dish in one shot, leave the oven on.)

Homemade breadcrumbs ready for coating! (Can be used for any recipe - so good!)

Next: prep the chicken.

8 thin slices deli ham

2 cups shredded Swiss cheese
4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
Salt and pepper

I definitely did not use 2 cups of cheese - I think this would have been overpowering to be honest...plus I only had three chicken breasts. Basically: you need two pieces of ham per breast. 

Note: I'm glad I read this thoroughly before shopping because your average chicken breasts will not be easy to work with - in fact you might end up  wanting to ball the recipe page up and tossing it. Get the biggest breasts you can find (insert inappropriate joke here).

Take your ham, sprinkle a nice amount of cheese on each slice and roll them up tightly (see photo). This is key! You'll see below that this is what keeps the cheese from oozing out of the chicken when cooking (like it always did for me!) 

Piggy-wrapped cheese.

Stuff the Chicken: Next, using a paring knife, gently slice a pocket into each breast. Be careful but also slice as big a pocket as you can. Keep the knife on hand when you stuff TWO ham roll ups into each one - you might need to make bigger pockets. And use your best judgment - these chicken breasts I bought were actually not uniform in size. One was Dolly Parton's long lost chicken's breast...another one was smaller in size but still huge and the smallest was still big but nothing in comparison to Dolly. I used two roll-ups in the two bigger ones and one in the smaller. All of this is to say: a recipe is a guideline. Not to be followed precisely (unless we're baking  - then it is more precise).

Ready to be stuffed!

Once the chicken is stuffed, sprinkle both sides with salt and pepper and put on a plate, cover with plastic wrap and chill in the fridge for at least 20 minutes. (You can do this in the morning and keep it ready finish until dinner time.) 

Next, coat and bake the chicken. 
3 large eggs
2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
1 cup all-purpose flour

Once the chicken is stuffed. Prep the rest of the coating. Whenever you coat your chicken with breadcrumbs it is important to follow a three-step process in a specific order. Flour, Egg, Breadcrumb (in culinary school I remembered this with the acronym "FLEB" and I use it to this day!)

• Flour: one cup. Do yourself a favor and season it. Salt, pepper and maybe some garlic powder. Sift it together with a fork.
• Eggs: 3 eggs and 2 tablespoons of dijon mustard. Whisk with a fork until uniform. This will add wonderful flavor to the meal.
• Breadcrumbs: you've already made them! If you take a short cut with store-bought, be sure to season it as well - you can even add fresh herbs if you want. Just don't go plain and dull!

Ready? Ready! Put the chicken on a cookie sheet (I use, and swear by, stoneware) and bake on the lowest rack for about 10 minutes at 450. After 10 minutes, move sheet to middle rack, reduce temp to 400 and bake until golden brown and until a thermometer placed in thickest part of chicken (do *not* place thermometer in the ham/cheese. Temp will not be helpful!) registers 165 degrees. About 25 minutes.

In my case: I baked it on the lower middle rack at 450 for about 20 minutes, then reduced the temp to 400 and continued for about 15 until my thermometer registered the right temp (remember that Dolly Parton-sized chicken breast? The bigger the breast, the longer it takes to cook through!)

Let sit for about 5 minutes after you pull it from the oven.

The result? Delicious Chicken Cordon Bleu with little mess (only a teeny bit of cheese leaked out!) I served it with long-grain rice. Probably should have included a veggie but I didn't.

Not the Dolly Parton one.

Lessons learned: 

1. This bread coating can be used again in other dishes. Tasty!
2. Always check with the hubs to find out if he despises Swiss Cheese with a passion (this one is important!)
3. The ham/cheese roll-up trick is great! 
4. Will cook this again using my husband's spin on it: goat cheese and prosciutto (he has already done this and it was a huge success.)