Bawdy chicken: Spicy Grilled Chicken Paillards

Cumin and paprika add plenty of flavor to Spicy Grilled Chicken Paillards, but not much heat, as do orange juice, lemon juice, honey, cinnamon and red pepper flakes to the sauce. Recipes below.

Marion has accused me in the past of being a culinary Francophile. And I’m the first to admit she’s right. Casting about for some grilling ideas for this week’s post, I came across a chicken recipe that called for chicken breasts sliced or lightly pounded into flattened pieces. If they’d used the modern term for this thin cut of meat, cutlet, I probably wouldn’t have given it a second glance. But no, they used the older French term, paillard [pronounced pah-YAHR], apparently named for a late 19th century Parisian restaurateur. Okay, I was interested.

I say “apparently” because, while food sources told the above story, numerous online French-English dictionaries made no mention of Monsieur Paillard or his cutlet. Instead, every last one of them defined paillard as some variation of bawdy, coarse, rude, lewd, libertine… Given the origin of Blue Kitchen’s name, I was of course totally hooked now. I had to make some bawdy chicken.

The first step was to find a recipe or some recipes to play with. After looking at a number of them, I landed on one with Moroccan influences. Considering Morocco’s French ties, it seemed like a good way to go. As with many North African savory dishes, it includes sweetness, a little heat and the ubiquitous cumin. The heat in this case is extremely subtle—mainly you notice a wonderful mix of flavors.

Paillards aren’t always chicken. They can also be made from boneless slices of turkey, veal, beef and pork. Because they’re so thin—typically a mere 1/4-inch to 3/8-inch thick—they’re meant to be cooked quickly. That makes them perfect for weeknight meals or anytime you have lots of other things you need to be doing rather than cooking.

Pounding the chicken—or any other meat—into thin slices also beautifully tenderizes it. Even cheaper, tougher cuts of meat fare well with this process. You can sauté paillards, cook them in a grill pan or actually grill them as I did here.

Grilling and lessons learned

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Last week I wrote my little anti-grilling manifesto, and here I am doing a grilling post this week. It’s not that I don’t like grilling or the wonderfully smokey taste of something done right on the grill—it’s that I don’t like not being in control, not feeling like I know what I’m doing.

But there’s just something so American about cooking outdoors, especially on that most American of holidays, the 4th of July. So I hauled out our beat-up Weber for the first time this year and gave it my best shot. The juicy, tender, grilled chicken you see above was our Independence Day dinner.

Regarding the control issue, one way to do something about it is to actually learn something about what you’re trying to do. For us, that often means a trip to the library. Marion and I are total library geeks, with overdue fine rap sheets as long as your arm. But librarians love us because we cheerfully pay the fines, figuring it’s still way cheaper than buying the hundreds of books and CDs and DVDs we borrow over any given year.

Occasionally as I peruse the cookbooks at the library, I’ll stray into the grilling section. Sometimes out of curiosity, more often out of guilt, I’ll actually check out a book on grilling, hoping to fix what I view as a cooking character flaw—my inability to reliably grill well. Most recently, it was this book: Mastering the Grill: The Owner’s Manual for Outdoor Cooking, a 4.2-pound tome roughly the size of a major city phone book.

I didn’t read the entire 416 pages—barely flipped through the recipes, in fact. My main focus was the front section on grilling techniques. This book drills deep, but does it in clear, readable prose and pictures. Much of what I read traveled safely through my brain without getting stuck, but something the authors said about indirect grilling stuck. And it made all the difference with this dish.