Just Two Ingredients Turn Frozen Chicken Nuggets Into Easy Italian Comfort Food

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Consider the frozen chicken nugget. Though never the fanciest of foods, more often associated with childhood nostalgia than fine dining, there's no denying their popularity, with the global frozen chicken nugget market valued at $23.4 billion in 2025 (per Market Intelo). It is difficult, on the other hand, to put a price on a good chicken parmigiana, but you can certainly rack up the time and effort it takes to prepare this classic Italian-American comfort food from scratch. So, if you're looking for something quick, easy, and tasty, or if you're simply curious to combine two beloved meal options together as one, think about pairing your frozen chicken nuggets with mozzarella and marinara sauce for a plateful of mini-chicken parms.

Lest you have never set foot in a traditional Italian-American "red sauce" eatery (which would be a tragedy), chicken parmigiana (also known as chicken parmesan or chicken parm) features a butterflied chicken cutlet dredged in flour and beaten egg, covered with breadcrumbs and Italian seasonings, then fried until crispy and golden. It is then topped with mozzarella and sometimes parmesan, baked until the cheese is melted, and served with warm marinara sauce, either alone, in a sandwich, or accompanied by sauced pasta. It's exactly as good as it sounds.

While we are not suggesting your nugget-based shortcut to parm paradise will replicate the real thing, it does advantageously skip several of the most time-consuming and labor-intensive steps. Simply bake your chicken nuggets in the oven on a baking sheet, according to the package instructions. Once cooked, remove the nuggets but leave them on the baking sheet, adding a small amount of marinara sauce and a perhaps not-so-small amount of mozzarella to each one. Heat them under the oven's broiler for roughly two minutes until the cheese is melted and serve.

If you've ever tasted chicken nuggets or chicken parm, you will have a good idea of what to expect in terms of taste from their amalgamation, but achieving the desired texture can be a trickier matter. In his recipe for chicken parmesan, cookbook author and host of YouTube's enormously popular online cooking show "Binging With Babish," Andrew Rea recommends melting the mozzarella on top of the chicken first, and adding your marinara on top of that in turn. The melted cheese will act as a protective layer, preventing the breading of the chicken from becoming unpleasantly soggy, so depending on the size of the nuggets you're working with, you may want to emulate this technique.

While one of the main virtues of this recipe is its simplicity, it is obviously open to adaptation. If you favor some heat, you could use a brand of spicy nuggets such as Just Bare Lightly Breaded Chicken Breast Spicy Bites, which rated highly in our ranking of seven commercially available spicy chicken nugget brands. If you really want to taste the difference, use fresh mozzarella, or make a marinara sauce that fits your own palate, perhaps boosted with garlic, red wine, or umami-rich soy sauce. And of course, there's nothing stopping you from shoving as many sauced, cheesy nuggets as will fit into a hoagie or ciabatta roll, thus making yourself an impromptu mini-parm sandwich.