The first time I had this lemony rich version of chicken piccata, I fell in love with Cerignola olives and caper berries. We had just eaten at the now closed Lidia's Pittsburgh, and I immediately bought Lidia's Italian-American Kitchen. Making this dish at home is even more satisfying. It is a surprisingly easy way to get a kid- and nanny-pleasing meal on the table! And its rich flavors & do ahead ease with a quick finish make for a great, visually pleasing meal for guests as well.
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| Gluten-free chicken scallopine piccata |
At its simplest, chicken piccata is flavored with lemon, capers, butter and maybe some wine. This is the most robustly delicious version I have ever tried, and it is rather easy to make.
I did not expect that the strong flavors in this dish would appeal to so many -- from young children to a nanny that likes plain hamburgers with all the toppings removed. I started off making the dish simply because I loved it, expecting perhaps some complaints because pickled items with a strong flavor often do not appeal to kids. But these flavors marry so well with the rich lemon and briny olive notes (x3) perfectly counterbalanced against the soothing buttery olive oil, all carried to the mouth by extremely tender chicken.
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| After browning the scallopini, a pan sauce is made. To finish the dish, rewarm the chicken in the sauce and top with parsley. |
The true secrets to this dish are the lemon slices fried in butter and olive oil and the large buttery Cerignola olives. Pounding the chicken into thin slices means they cook very quickly are stay amazingly tender. And of course, the caper berries add another level of excitement. Although the recipe says to remove the lemon slices along with the garlic, I think they look beautiful and have caught people fighting over who gets to eat them!
The Restaurant
There are lots of chicken piccatas out there. But the lemon-butter-caper sauce of versions I had tried growing up came across as rather pedestrian and bland, weighed down by excess breading, despite the promise of those three ingredients. Everything changed for me when my husband and I dined at Lidia's Pittsburgh for the first time about 20 years ago. Lidia Bastianich is a popular PBS cooking star, and it was exciting to discover her newly opened restaurant in the Steel City.
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| Lidia's on May 21, 2019. This would have been my last time eating here before they closed in Sept. 2019, but unfortunately the broken water main down the road took out their water. |
This sublime dish is simply entitled Pollo al Limone on the menu, consisting of chicken breast, roasted lemon, capers, Cerignola olives and served with a side of velvety spinach. The flavors were bold - briny, lemony and rich. And the mound of bright green spinach was truly velvety, complementing the chicken perfectly.
There were three different sources of green-olive-like flavor: the sliced olives, tiny round capers with lemony floral overtones, and occasional rich bites of something else...
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| Flavor bombs: garlic, olives, caper berries, capers, lemon, dry white wine |
When we first enjoyed the dish, we noted some stemmed, olive green, teardrop-shaped fruits that were full of tiny, edible seeds in addition to the usual small round capers. We inquired with the waiter, who informed us that they were caper berries. While capers represent the unopened flower bud, caper berries are formed from the fertilized fruit of the caper plant.
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