This week our Teen Chefs are going all Italian!

They will be making Chicken Caprese with Balsamic Glaze served with a Lemon & fresh Pea Risotto

This chicken dish will be full of flavour created from the ingredients used for the traditional Italian starter – Caprese salad; made using fresh tomato, buffalo mozzarella, basil, olive oil, salt and pepper.

It is believed the salad was created as a symbol of the Italian flag, with the red, the green and the white elements layered in turn on the plate, we will use these ingredients to stuff our chicken breasts.  We will then coat our chicken breasts in a sweet balsamic glaze, to be served with a lemon and pea risotto.

Risotto is a northern Italian rice dish cooked with stock until it reaches a creamy consistency. The stock can be derived from meat, fish, or vegetables.  Our risotto will be a classic version containing butter, onion, white wine, and parmesan cheese and seasonal fresh podded peas and pea shoots to garnish.  It is one of the most common ways of cooking rice in Italy.

A successful risotto is all about having a good technique and a lot of patience, as the stock must be added gradually so that the rice is always kept moist but not drowned in liquid.   Italian cooks literally stand over the pan the whole time the risotto is cooking stirring constantly at first then as the rice cooks stirring less frequently this technique ensures a creamy texture that has a loose consistency while keeping the grains al dente resulting in a perfectly cooked risotto.

In this week’s dish we will be using the following skills:

Knife skills: preparing onions, making risotto, measuring, grating, mixing/combining and roasting, juicing, zesting, crushing, cutting, pan frying.

See you Saturday Teen Chefs.