Chicken Breasts with Whole-Grain Mustard Sauce

*Post by Angela.
Right now, I have 5 huge, hard-covered cookbooks on my living room table (plus a handful of cooking magazines).  Every week, Mark and I salivate over the gorgeous photos in these cookbooks, picking out recipes we'd like to make/think we could handle making.  Yet every time I cook, I find myself running to the Internets (all hail the Internets!) to find recipes.  I think it's mostly due to the fact that most recipes I find online (especially those from allrecipes or recipezaar) have suggestions and alterations posted from people who have actually made the recipes; it might also be because I can no longer read anything that isn't on a computer screen.  Whatever the reason, I've decided to make a very, very belated New Year's resolution (maybe an April Fool's Day resolution?  That makes no sense) to use my cookbooks more, and decided to try another recipe from my Williams-Sonoma cookbook - with my own little spin, of course - chicken breasts with whole-grain mustard sauce.  The result was juicy, tender chicken with a pleasantly piquant and creamy sauce that's versatile enough to use on the protein of your choice. 

Click below to get the recipe!

List of ingredients for the chicken & mustard sauce:

3 skinless, boneless chicken breasts

1 cup all-purpose flour

Salt and freshly ground pepper

2 tbsp. unsalted butter

2 tbsp. vegetable oil

1 shallot, finely minced

1/2 cup dry white wine

3/4 cup heavy whipping cream

3 tbsp. whole-grain mustard

I'm not a huge chicken breast fan.  I usually prefer dark meat, as I think it's more flavorful, and doesn't dry out as quickly.  But there is one way that I love making chicken breasts: pounding them thin, coating them with flour, then pan-frying them in a combination of butter and oil (the original calls for sauteeing the chicken, unbreaded, but that is not how I do).  The flour coating and the quick cook time seals the juices in the meat and virtually guarantees you moist, tender chicken.

First, I placed each breast in a plastic bag and pounded it until it was about 1/4-1/2 inch thick.  The important thing is to make sure that the meat is pounded to a consistent thickness, so that it cooks evenly.  That being said, the thinner you pound the meat, the quicker it cooks.  I ended up cutting each piece in half to better fit in the pan.

Next, I put the flour in a container with a generous helping of salt and pepper (maybe a couple of tsp. each) and dredged each piece of chicken in the mixture.

I heated the butter and oil together in the pan over medium high heat.

Once the foam subsided, I added the chicken, cooking about 4-5 minutes per side (until golden brown and cooked through).

I removed the chicken to a plate and covered it with foil.  Then I started on the mustard sauce.

I returned the pan to medium heat and added the minced shallots, cooking them until softened, about 3-4 minutes.

I added the wine and whisked, making sure to get all the browned bits off the bottom of the pan.  I simmered until the wine had reduced down to about 3 tbsp., about 5 minutes.

I stirred in the cream and seasoned with salt and pepper.  Then I brought the mixture to a boil and cooked about 3-4 minutes, whisking constantly, until the sauce was sufficiently thickened.  I also threw in about a tsp. of flour to help out (with the thickening).

Finally, I removed the pan from the heat and whisked in the mustard until the sauce was smooth.

I served this with some leftover mashed potatoes.  While my first chicken recipe from this cookbook didn't turn out quite the way I wanted it to, the easy-peasy and deliciously tangy mustard sauce more than made up for it - I can see serving this with any number of things, fish, pork, steak, vegetables...  Mark, who claimed he wasn't that hungry when he showed up for dinner, begged for a second helping.  The Great Cookbook Experiment of 2010 is off to a great start!