Chicken saltimbocca. Italian recipe

Saltimbocca is one of the classic dishes of Italian cuisine, saltimbocca alla romana , which are part of those ricettes della nonna , grandmother’s recipes that are prepared like a lifetime. The original recipe is based on veal meat but today we have prepared the dish a little tuned, chicken saltimbocca, changing the original meat for chicken breasts.

It is a recipe as simple as it is tasty, the combination of the meat with one of its star ingredients, sage , bathed in a butter sauce and Marsala wine, is balanced, tasty and different. We will give in a minimum of time, an incomparable touch to some simple chicken breasts.

Although sage is an herb that has no special tradition in our gastronomy, today we can find it on large surfaces and herbalists, I am talking about fresh sage, of course. We cannot make this recipe with dried sage or substitutes. If you are one of those who like to have an aromatic plant at home to have it fresh at the moment, I encourage you to include this in your city garden, so you will not have to move Rome with Santiago every time you have a breast at home. chicken and you want to prepare this recipe.

A couple of notes, although the original recipe uses Italian Marsala wine to prepare the sauce, we can use any other that we have at home. Preparing the sauce with butter can be somewhat rare or unusual, I encourage you to keep the original recipe and not replace it with oil, the characteristic flavor it provides would not be the same if we used another fat. I hope you prepare this dish at home and then you will tell me about it, a delight to eat bread and dough, yummy.

Preparation of the chicken Saltimbocca

1. We clean the chicken breasts eliminating possible fat residues that they may have. We cut the breasts into 8 fillets of about 70-80 gr. If we want them to be very thin, we can crush them a little by tapping them lightly with a kitchen roller, once covered with transparent paper.
2. On top of each filetito we place a slice of Serrano ham and on top of this one or more, depending on the size, sage leaves that we hold with a toothpick.
3. It is not necessary to add salt to the meat, the one provided by the ham is enough. The ideal is to cover almost the entire surface of the fillet with the sage leaves, so if we have small leaves we will put several.
4. We heat the butter in a frying pan and add the mounted fillets with the leaf down, which is the first to fry, so the butter will be impregnated from the beginning of the sage aromas. We fry on both sides for a few minutes and reserve on a tray, covering the fillets with aluminum foil to try to keep them warm until we finish frying them all.
5. Once we have all the fillets ready we reserve them on a tray and add the Marsala wine splash or the sweet wine that we are going to use to the pan. With the help of a wooden spoon we are releasing the juices that have been stuck to the bottom of the pan.

We put the fillets back in the pan so that they cook for 2 or 3 minutes with the wine and butter sauce. We serve very hot accompanied by a good piece of bread to dip and washed with the sauce. A delicious dish of yummy.

You can see all the photos of the step by step in the next album.