The Chicken Recipe Ina Garten Has Made More Than Any Other

Who wouldn’t want to be a guest at Ina Garten’s table at least once? If she had you over for breakfast, maybe she’d serve scrambled eggs with goat cheese on the grill. During the holidays, she may serve you a roasted filet of beef. Before dinner, she may serve her salted caramel nuts as a snack. Whatever she serves, is there any question that it will be delicious and made with the best quality ingredients?

There’s one dish that Ina has served to more guests than any other, she revealed in a cooking video. She calls it the dish for “mystery guests,” those whom she doesn’t know ahead of time what they like to eat. It’s her safety dish, the one “everybody loves.”

It’s also a simple dish with simple ingredients that’s not particularly expensive to make.

Ina’s Parmesan Chicken

Not to be confused with traditional Chicken Parmesan (the Italian-inspired dish that smothers breaded chicken with tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese), Ina’s Parmesan Chicken is a simple breaded chicken dish topped with greens.

She sets up a breading station—one bowl with seasoned flour, one with egg, and one with seasoned dry bread crumbs mixed with grated Parmesan cheese. Then she coats tenderized boneless, skinless chicken breasts in the flour, the egg, and the breadcrumb mixture before pan-frying them in butter and olive oil.

After cooking each batch of chicken, Ina keeps the cooked pieces warm in a 200 degrees F (93 degrees C) oven until they’re all fried and ready to serve. Right before serving, she makes a simple salad of greens topped with olive oil and lemon to serve on top of the cooked Parmesan chicken. After Ina plates the chicken topped with the salad, she adds some Parmesan shavings on top of the salad before serving.

“The hot chicken and the cold salad is just a great combination,” she says. (For more precise instructions, the recipe is on the Barefoot Contessa website.)

What to Serve with Ina’s Parmesan Chicken

What side would Ina serve with this simple main dish? On her website, she suggests tomatoes and Burrata. Roasted broccoli with Parmesan cheese or oven-roasted potatoes would work well, too.

Few of us will ever actually be guests around Ina Garten’s table. But if we can’t be, perhaps we can make her Parmesan Chicken for our own guests, making them feel just as welcomed around our table as the celebrity chef makes her guests feel around hers.