All It Takes Is One Sauce Swap For Chicken Parmesan To Go Full Gourmet

An Italian-American classic that conjures images of red checkered tablecloths, leather-backed booths, and large bottles of red wine housed in wicker baskets, chicken parmesan is a dish that one could argue needs no improvements. But if you feel like bending the rules a bit, swapping marinara for vodka sauce would be an exciting change. Generally speaking, vodka sauce is creamier than marinara, but the swap shouldn't affect the texture of the overall dish. 

The majority of the procedure for making chicken parmesan with vodka sauce remains the same as the basic method for the original. The only difference in the overall methodology would be that you'd start by making a vodka sauce rather than a classic marinara sauce. If you don't feel like making a sauce from scratch, we totally get it, but make sure to use one of our highest-ranked store-bought vodka sauces to ensure the best flavor and texture.

Next, you'd continue the original steps for making a classic chicken parm, where you'd butterfly and use a meat pounder to flatten chicken breasts before dredging them in flour, egg, and breadcrumbs and shallow-frying them in a pan. From there, you'd assemble the dish the same way by spreading a bit of the vodka sauce in the bottom of a baking dish, adding the fried cutlets to the dish (or layering half the chicken, depending on the size of your dish), then covering the chicken with more sauce and topping everything with mozzarella and parmesan cheeses before sliding the dish into the oven to bake until the cheeses are bubbly and beginning to brown.

To really make your vodka sauce chicken parm to the next level, don't rely on cream and butter alone for a luxurious vodka sauce. Instead, make sure that you lean into the salty, umami-laden ingredient whose name is key to the chicken parmesan recipe. If you'd like to try something other than parmesan, Pecorino Romano is another hard, salty, aged cheese that would complement the vodka sauce nicely. Another way to really bump up the flavor in homemade vodka sauce is to use a bit of diced Italian pork product, like guanciale, prosciutto, or pancetta. A bit of bacon will also suffice if that's all you can find. Add the finely chopped cured pork to the pan first to either cook it off or render out some of the fat, then saute your aromatics like onion and garlic in the rendered pork fat, and continue with your recipe. Make sure to use the rest of our favorite tips for making the best chicken parmesan.

Don't stress about offending any Italians with this sauce swap, as chicken parmesan is a distinctly Italian-American invention. While eggplant parmesan, known as melanzane alla parmigiana, is a typical and simple Southern Italian dish, Italian immigrants who came to the United States in the early 20th century arrived to find that meats were much more available and affordable, prompting the eventual shift from eggplant to breaded chicken (and veal) cutlets.