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Another romantic dinner for two recipe coming your way! This Lemon Chicken Piccata is made with thin-cut chicken breasts cooked in a lemon caper broth. The recipe makes a generous amount of broth, perfect for tossing with pasta!
If my husband has one flaw, itโs that he doesnโt love olives or other briny things. Itโs okay though, because my daughter and I share the jars of pickles, olives, and sauerkraut in our fridge.
Capers, though, are a tough sell for her. When I make my Chicken Cacciatore for Two, she picks around the capers. I told her capers taste like little pops of pickles, but sheโs leery because they resemble peppercorns.
However, this story has a happy ending, because this Lemon Chicken Piccata is what won Camille over with capers. She now loves capers and takes delight in their sour punchy bite. Finally, sheโs on my side again!
This recipe serves two people very generously, and by that I mean: two adults and a toddler in my house.
Ingredients
- Butter. Two tablespoons of unsalted butter, for searing the chicken breasts.
- Olive Oil. Because butter can burn sometimes when searing meat, a great tip is to cut it with one tablespoon of olive oil. This raises the smoke point of the cooking oils and prevents burning.
- Flour. One-third cup of all-purpose flour for coating the chicken breasts. The flour on the outside of the chicken helps to thicken the pan sauce later, too!
- Chicken Breasts. My first choice for this Lemon Chicken Piccata is thin-cut chicken breasts. However, these are a pricier cut of meat because they are simply regular chicken breasts that have had the chicken tender removed and sliced in half to make two thinner chicken breasts. You can do this yourself at home with one large chicken breast to serve two people!
- Chicken Broth. Three-quarters of a cup of chicken broth. I use low-sodium because I salt and pepper my chicken before cooking.
- Lemon Juice. One-quarter cup of freshly squeezed lemon juice. To be honest, bottled lemon juice is fine here!
- Capers. Grab a small jar of capers (in the pickle and olive section of your grocery store), and drain the jar to measure out 2 tablespoons of capers.
- Spaghetti Noodles. Itโs entirely optional to make the pasta for this recipe, but youโre going to have a lot of pan sauce after cooking the lemon chicken piccata. Itโs best to boil 6 ounces of spaghetti noodles, and stir them into the pan so the delicious sauce has something to cling to.
How to Make Lemon Chicken Piccata:
First, bring water to a boil for cooking the pasta. Next, coat the chicken breasts in the flour, along with a big pinch of salt and freshly ground black pepper.
Melt the butter and olive oil in a skillet, and sear the chicken on both sides.
Add the chicken broth, lemon juice, and capers to the pan, and simmer. Test the chicken to ensure itโs done before turning off the heat.
Remove the chicken from the pan, and add the freshly cooked pasta to the pan to soak up the cooking juices. Slice the chicken, and serve it with the pasta.
Cooking for two tips:
If youโre making this for a romantic dinner for two, make it once to practice first, ok? Itโs never a good idea to make something for the first time on a date night. That is, unless one or both of you are pretty adept in the kitchen and you have two sets of hands in case anything goes wrong.
The only tricky part about this dish is having the pasta ready at the same time as the chicken. If you bring the pasta water to a boil the same time you start searing the chicken, it should be fully boiling when itโs time to add the sauce ingredients to the pan. While the chicken finishes cooking all the way through in the sauce for 8-10 minutes, the pasta cooks. Everything is done at the same time like magic! I love it when that happens!
So grab two plates, and a bottle of your favorite white wine (I love the crispness of Pinot Grigio here to match the acidity of the lemon), and enjoy this romantic dinner for two!
Lemon Chicken Piccata
Lemon chicken piccata for two.
Ingredients
- 6 ounces uncooked spaghetti pasta
- 2 tablespoons unsalted butter
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
- 1/3 cup all-purpose flour
- 2 6-ounce boneless, skinless chicken breasts
- 3/4 cup chicken broth
- 1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
- 2 tablespoons capers, drained
Instructions
- Bring a large pot of water to a boil and cook the pasta according to the package directions.
- In a 9" heavy skillet, melt the butter and olive oil over medium-high heat.
- Place the flour in a shallow dish, add a big pinch of salta and pepper, and then dip the chicken into the flour, dusting off the excess. You want a thin coating of flour all over the chicken breasts.
- When the butter and olive oil are sizzling in the skillet, carefully place each chicken breast in the pan. Sear the breasts on each side until golden brown. Don't worry about cooking the chicken all the way through at this point, just get each side golden brown.
- At this point, your pasta water should be at a rolling boil, and this is the best time to add the pasta to the boiling water. Then, now that both sides of the chicken is golden brown, lower the heat to medium-low, and pour in the chicken broth, lemon juice and capers. Cover the skillet. Let the chicken simmer until it registers 165-degrees F in the thickest part.
- Drain the pasta and have it ready on the side.
- Once the chicken is done, move it to the serving plates, and add the cooked pasta to the skillet to soak up the chicken pan sauce. Slice the chicken and return it to the pan.
- Divide between two serving plates, and serve.
Notes
Nutrition Information:
Yield:
2Serving Size:
1Amount Per Serving: Calories: 661Total Fat: 24gSaturated Fat: 10gUnsaturated Fat: 15gCholesterol: 133mgSodium: 787mgCarbohydrates: 60gFiber: 3gSugar: 2gProtein: 47g
Wow, a terrific selection of lemon goodness. Thank you
Iโm so glad youโre a lemon lover like me, Beth :)
Dear. itโs looking so nice. can I make it without โbutterโ?
sure, that sounds okay to me :) Use olive oil :)
Chicken, lemon and pasta go sooo well!! I love cappers so much, they remind me of my childhood summer holidays in Mallorca with my best friend! We would go cappers picking with my BFF grandparent. He owned the most amazing cappers plantation and we would get ice cream as compensation for all the hard work. Whicc basically constested on picking the cappers and fool around all day!! Had so much fun those days! hehe
And now I think I feel old by thinking how much time has gone by evern sinceโฆ
Itโs amazing how food can transport your mind to all sorts of memories, isnโt it fun? :-)
Do you think it would work with zucchini-noodles or Spaghetti Squash instead of pasta?
Yes, that sounds delicious!
Yumm!!! This looks so tasty. I live in a house divided, too. My husband LOVES capers; I am much less fond of them, lol. He also got me to eat piccata dishes by promising lots of lemony butter sauce, and pasta with which to sop up said sauce. We have a regular recipe for chicken piccata that we use, but it serves 6 โ and we are only two! So, I will be trying your recipe. :-)
I noticed you have lemon slices in the skillet in the first and third photos, but donโt include them in the recipe (some piccata recipes DO use slices of fresh lemon in the creation of the sauce). I seem to have a particular sensitivity to bitter flavors, as in: any bitter ingredients overwhelm my taste buds and I canโt taste anything else. If I were to use lemon slices in a piccata recipe, the bitterness in the pith of the lemon slices would be all I could taste. However, the skin of the lemon does contribute a lovely lemon flavor. Since youโre going to be squeezing a lemon or two for the lemon juice in the sauce, a nice thing to do (and what I do, when making piccata) is to remove just the yellow part of the skin from the lemons in long strips (pole to pole; vertically) using a vegetable peeler, prior to squeezing them. If you want, you can stack the strips and cut them into julienne for a neater appearance. Just add the strips to the sauce when you add the broth, lemon juice, and capers. Adding the strips really bumps up the lemon flavor, and makes the finished dish even prettier!
My very picky husband loved this. We will make it again.
OH WOW I love lemon and chicken. this looks like my kind of meal yummyTFS