Chicken Marsala is all about the sauce, which should be velvety and have the perfect balance of sweet and savory flavors. We have a few tricks up our sleeve for the velvety texture (more on that in a minute), but the sweetness mostly comes from the Marsala wine. You can find a good quality Marsala wine for around five dollars, so there’s just no reason to resort to using ‘Marsala cooking wine’ which has other additions like salt and will only mess with the balance of your sauce. A squeeze of lemon is all you need at the end to bring the sweet and savory notes into harmony, but white wine vinegar or sherry vinegar work just fine too.
Now, for the velvety texture. There are a few ingredients in this recipe that help to create that silky mouthfeel. The first is flour. When you coat the chicken breasts in flour, it not only thickens the sauce, but also ensures that there are lots of flavorful brown bits to scrape up and flavor it. The second is butter, which is whisked in at the end and creates an emulsion so that the sauce is nearly creamy. The third, which is a little bit of a cooking trick, is to dissolve a packet of unflavored gelatin in your chicken stock. This adds collagen to stock that isn’t homemade and is a great tip to add body to many kinds of sauces.
As long as you make sure to pound the chicken breasts thin, this classic Chicken Marsala shouldn’t take you more than thirty minutes to get to the dinner table. Serve it alongside mashed potatoes, polenta, egg noodles, or even rice, and you’ve got a reliable weeknight staple that’s always sure to please.
