Milanesa with Almond Flour

Almond flour standing in for both the flour and the breadcrumbs, which takes the wheat out and most of the carbohydrate with it. It is not a swap you can make without changing anything else: the coating colours in about half the time, so the pan runs cooler than you expect.

Total time: 20 min
Serves: 4
Made: 6 times · rated 5/5

Ingredients

For the cutlets

700 g boneless chicken breast or pork loin
salt, to taste
black pepper, freshly ground

For the breading

48 g (½ cup) almond flour
2 large eggs
2 cloves garlic, finely grated
2 tbsp flat-leaf parsley, finely chopped
144 g (1½ cups) almond flour
¼ cup Parmigiano-Reggiano, finely grated

To fry and serve

2 tbsp olive oil, plus more as needed
2 tbsp sunflower oil, plus more as needed
1 lemon, cut into wedges

Equipment

heavy skillet, 26 cm (10 in) or wider
wire rack, for draining

Instructions

Cut the meat into cutlets. Chicken breast is butterflied — sliced most of the way through horizontally and opened like a book; pork loin is simply cut into slices about 2 cm thick. Lay each piece between two sheets of baking paper and pound it out to an even 1 cm (⅜ in). Season both sides with salt and pepper.
Set up three wide, shallow dishes: the smaller quantity of almond flour in the first; the eggs in the second, beaten with the garlic, parsley and a pinch of salt; the larger quantity of almond flour in the third, tossed with the Parmigiano-Reggiano.
Take each cutlet through all three in order — almond flour first, shaking off everything loose, then egg, letting the excess drip back, then the almond flour and cheese. Press this last coat on hard. Almond flour has no starch to gel against the egg and grips far less willingly than breadcrumbs do, so a coating that was only sprinkled on will be lying in the pan rather than on the meat.
Heat the oven to 95 °C (200 °F) and put the wire rack over a baking sheet. Heat the olive and sunflower oils together in the skillet over medium-low heat — a full step below where you would take breadcrumbs.
Fry the cutlets two at a time, about 2–3 minutes a side, until an even golden brown. Watch them rather than the clock. Almond flour is a nut meal with its own fat and sugars in it; it goes from pale to dark far faster than a breadcrumb crust and carries on colouring in the residual heat after it leaves the pan. Move each batch to the wire rack, then into the low oven while the rest cook. Top up the oil between batches — this coating drinks more of it than breadcrumbs do.
Serve straight away, with the lemon wedges to squeeze over.

Notes & tips

From the source.

Check the almond flour packet if the gluten matters to someone. Almond flour is naturally gluten-free, but some brands are milled on lines shared with wheat and say so in the small print. Nothing about this recipe can tell you that; the bag can.
Expect a different crust, not a worse one. It is tender-crisp and sandy rather than shattering, and it browns to a deeper colour at a lower temperature. Judging it by how a breadcrumb crust looks is what leads to burning it.
Blanched almond flour behaves better than almond meal here. The coarser ground, with the skins in, catches and burns in patches.
If you have the time, resting the breaded cutlets 10–15 minutes before frying helps, and it helps more here than it does with breadcrumbs, for the same reason step 3 does. It is not necessary — skipping it is what keeps this a twenty-minute dinner. The cutlets can also be breaded several hours ahead and kept uncovered in the fridge on their tray.
Skip the low oven and serve straight from the pan if you can. This coating softens sooner than a breadcrumb one under any amount of holding.

Variations

A la napolitana — top the fried cutlets with tomato sauce, a slice of ham and mozzarella, and melt it under the grill. Check the tomato sauce if the dish has to stay gluten-free.
Milanese-style, with a salad on top — dressed rocket, quartered cherry tomatoes and shaved Parmigiano-Reggiano piled over the hot cutlets.
Half and half — almond flour cut with an equal weight of grated Parmigiano-Reggiano gives a crust that holds together more firmly, at the cost of being considerably saltier.

My notes

What actually happened when this was cooked.

Six times now, chicken and pork both. Holds up as well as the breadcrumb version rather than reading as the compromise it looks like on paper.
The rest after breading gets skipped, same as the breadcrumb version. Pressing the coating on hard in step 3 is what has to carry it.

Source

Adapted from Domenica Marchetti's Restaurant-Style Chicken Milanese at The Mediterranean Dish. Generalised to chicken or pork, seasoned as a milanesa is, and rebuilt around an almond flour coating — which is the author's own substitution and not one the source offers. Quantities and method are the author's own; nothing here is a transcription.