How to Oven Cook Chicken Fillets

Chicken is one of my family's favorite meals. I have found that my children eat chicken nuggets better than whole breasts, so I have started making chicken with many different flavored breadings. Also, cooking chicken in the oven is much healthier than frying it and my family eats it just as well out the oven. This is my preferred method of making chicken. You can make all sorts of breading flavors. Some that I have made have been sweeter than others and my most recent nuggets were a little on the spicy side of things. I made my own version of Emeril's Essence to add to my plain breadcrumbs, I will include that recipe a little later. The basics of making chicken fillets in the oven are always the same for me. I start out with a good sized chicken breast and then use a mallet to thin out the breast until it is about a quarter to a half inch thick. I use three to four chicken breasts and pound them between two pieces of plastic wrap. Then, I take my large chef's knife and chop the breast into about three strips. I cut each strip into two or three pieces, depending on the size of the breast. Each piece will be about an inch or two long, whichever is your preference. You can keep the breast whole or in strips if you like.

I then set three bowls up; one for flour, one for a milk/egg mixture and one for the breadcrumbs. When I made my most recent batch, I seasoned both the flour and the breadcrumbs with a tablespoon of the Essence seasoning. This ended up giving the chicken a more flavorful taste. You can also leave the flour and breadcrumbs plain, or use Italian breadcrumbs. Another variation would be to add a tablespoon of ranch seasoning to the flour and breadcrumbs instead of the Essence. In a different version, I have used a tablespoon of powdered sugar with paprika and pepper blended into the flour and breadcrumbs. All versions are quite tasty. If you soak the chicken in buttermilk for an hour before breading, it will be almost heavenly. You can make regular milk into buttermilk by adding a tablespoon of white vinegar or lemon juice to a cup of milk. It just needs to combine for five minutes, then you can use it to soak your chicken in before cooking. This makes the chicken very tender.

Roll the chicken in the flour mixture first, then dredge it in the milk/egg mixture. Let that drip off a little bit and then put the chicken piece into the breadcrumbs. You may need to pat the crumbs on a bit to make them stick better to the chicken. Place the chicken pieces onto a greased cookie sheet for baking in the oven. Then all you have to do is bake at 350° for about 15-20 minutes, turning the chicken over halfway through the baking time. I serve the chicken breasts, strips or nuggets with Ranch dressing, Sweet Baby Ray's BBQ sauce and ketchup for dipping. The chicken nuggets rarely last the evening, even if we can't finish the pile at dinner, we end up eating them up for late night snacks!