Chicken Cordon Bleu

Chicken Cordon Bleu is a French-inspired dish of rolled chicken, ham and cheese that is breaded, and typically fried or baked. Cordon Bleu literally means "blue ribbon" in French, which is reference to the Cordon Bleu awarded to chefs of outstanding quality in France. However, this dish was actually developed in the United States by chefs who were trying to imitate other stuffed poultry dishes from Europe, like Chicken Kiev.

It is actually a fairly easy meal to make, that is sure to impress future in-laws, please dinner parties, or just break up your usual weeknight dinners. It needs to sit in the fridge for at least an hour to set before it is cooked, so its a great dish to make earlier in the day and keep you out of the kitchen when guests are arriving. Serve with roasted potatoes, or wild rice rice, steam veggies (for some colour!), and even a grainy mustard sauce.

What you'll need:

• 4 Chicken Breasts
• 4 slices of Cold Cut Smoked Ham
• 4 oz Gruyère Cheese, Grated
• 2 Eggs
• 2 cups Bread Crumbs
• 1 tbsp Butter
• 1 tbsp Olive Oil
• Salt and Pepper

Grate the Gruyère cheese (and make sure to make some extra to nibble on). It is a great swiss cheese, that is perfect for this recipe, but is also amazing in a grilled cheese, with a little bit of ham, maybe some mustard. Yum.

Whiskey knows when there is cheese around. You've heard of bloodhounds? He's a cheesehound...and a chiphound, and a babycarrothound. Its a new breed. He likes to hover around the kitchen waiting for my habitual clumsiness to deliver the goods.

Place a 1/4 of the cheese onto each slice of ham. You can add more or less depending on how big the piece of ham is, or how cheesy you like it.

Like a burrito, fold the sides up, then the bottom and roll it over into a little packet.

And there you have it - cheesy ham pockets. Set them aside for later.

Trim the chicken. You want them to be fairly uniform in size, so remove the little fillets if there are any and set aside. We can use those later to make some chicken fingers during the breading.

Carefully take your knife and cut along the side of chicken breast. As you can tell, those aren't my hands doing the trimming...its my good friend AC. One of the best cooks I've ever known, and he introduced me to the world of Indian food, for which I will be eternally grateful for. But we're talking about French cuisine, not Indian, so time to get back to the chicken...

Continuing cutting it to the end, creating a "book". 

 

Open up the "book", and cut it alittle more until it will lay flat. Make sure not to cut through, or you'll lose all your cheesy goodness when it cooks. Set all the chicken pieces aside on a plate.

When I'm pounding any meat, I like to sandwich it between two pieces of cling wrap, to make clean up easy. Take a large piece of cling wrap, and lay it across the cutting board.

Using tongs (to keep your hands clean), place one of the chicken breasts on the cling wrap.

Place another large piece of cling wrap on top, and using a rolling pin, pound the chicken until it is 1/4' thick all over.

Lift of the top piece of cling wrap, and using the tongs, take the flattened chicken and set back on the plate. Continue the entire process with the remaining chicken breasts.

Season both sides of each flattened chicken with salt and pepper. I like to put the salt and pepper in a little bowl so that I can use my fingers to sprinkle it all over each piece evenly.

Picture the chicken piece as a book that you are going to close, and place one of the ham and cheese packets right beside the "seam".

Fold the "book" over.

In a shallow dish, crack the eggs, add salt and pepper, and mix with a fork.

In another shallow dish, add some salt and pepper.

Pour the bread crumbs on top. I used store bought bread crumbs this time, but I love to take a day old baguette, toast it and crush it into homemade bread crumbs. Try it sometime, they are fantastic.

Give it the crumbs a stir to make sure the seasoning is combined.

I find it makes it easier if you lay the bowls out like an assembly line, with a clean plate at the end to place the finished chicken on.

Carefully take a folded piece of chicken, and roll it in the egg mixture, making sure to coat both sides.

Place the chicken in the breadcrumbs, flipping over and making sure to thoroughly coat. I also like to take the fillets that I trimmed off of the chicken and bread them like the breasts. They make tasty little chicken fingers.

Place the chicken pieces on the clean plate. Two of the pieces did not have ham in them for some non-pork eating friends (I used turkey cold cuts instead), so I sprinkled a little paprika on them to make sure that they didn't get mixed up. Wrap the plate in cling wrap and set it in the fridge for an hour to set.

I wanted to do a little experiment while I was cooking these up, so I set up a stainless steel pan and a non-stick pan at the same time to see how the chicken would cook up differently. Heat the pan on medium heat, add in the olive oil and the butter to melt.

Place the chicken breasts (and the breaded fillets too) in the pan and cook for 2-3 on one side.

Using tongs, turn the chicken over and cook for 2-3 minutes on the other side.

With both pans on the same temperature, with the exact same quantities, the chicken on the left was perfect (from the non-stick pan), and then one of the right was done too much (from the stainless steel pan). Place the chicken breasts in a parchment lined baking dish, and put in the oven for 15-20 minutes, or until cooked through.

And there you have it! Delicious Chicken Cordon Bleu, that will ooze our melted cheesy goodness when you cut into it. I wish I'd taken a picture of it to show you, but these were devoured so quickly that there were only crumbs left. And Whiskey laid claim to those.

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