Breaded Parm Chicken Giard

Read Time: 13 minutes

This sandwich blog post is about a crispy, chickeny, cheesy, and giardinera-y sandwich that should satisfy a whole lot of cravings. If you follow along, you’ll see that I’ve walked through where the sandwich inspiration came from, along with the components involved, and even shared a sandwich and bun recipe to go along with it. As always, there’s that Jump to Recipe button if you just want instant gratification, or you can scroll through to see how many photos a guy can take of fried chicken cutlets, cheese, and pickled vegetables.

What is this sandwich?

This sandwich is inspired by, but not necessarily a copycat of, a dish that I recently had at a national winery chain restaurant called Cooper’s Hawk Winery and Restaurant. My wife and I were running suburban errands, and we were starving and decided to give it a try.

Cooper’s Hawk was founded in Orland Park, Illinois, and has grown into a chain with 69—nice—locations across the Midwest and Southeast United States. If you’ve never visited, the feel of the restaurant is closer to a higher-end chain like Maggiano’s or Cheesecake Factory (not one designed by Saddam Hussein) than it is to something like an Applebee’s or Chili’s. They have a ton of different wines their company produced that are paired with each menu item by Bin Number. So if you want to go with a suggested pairing, you find the dish you want to eat, look at the Bin Number listed beside the menu entry, and then match it up with the wine list.

Here’s my lunch portion of Tim’s Favorite Chicken Giardiniera from Cooper’s Hawk (sorry for the shadows caused by the light fixtures at the bar).

Apologies for the two photos in the section that I took at Cooper’s Hawk. We sat at the bar, and some weird lighting and shadows were happening that I didn’t really notice when we sat down. I also really wasn’t planning to make a sandwich inspired by my entree. Hopefully the photos still seem to convey what they need to display.

The Cooper’s Hawk Winery & Restaurant chain was founded in 2005 and seems to have launched out of the gate strong by winning a lot of food and beverage awards during its early years of existence. Eventually, it was purchased by a private equity company called Ares Management in 2019 for approximately 700 million dollars. I know a lot of people (myself very much included) have come to expect that when chains like this get scooped up by private equity, their quality will suffer, but my wife and I really did enjoy our food and service during our first and only visit to a Cooper’s Hawk restaurant. I typically prefer to support a local business, but if I’m nearby and looking for a meal, I would definitely give them a second shot based on our experience.

Here’s the promo photo for the lunch portion (which is what I also ordered). Their photo looks better than what I got, but the food all presented well in the restaurant.

This isn’t really meant to be a review of our visit, but my wife and I tried the Thai lettuce wraps, and she ordered the chicken Maidera (which I tasted). All three dishes were better than either of us expected. Don’t expect cheap food, though. The entrees are all pushing towards the top pricing of chain restaurant fare.

The menu at Cooper’s Hawk has an entree-sized Chicken Giardiniera, but if you show up between 11 am and 3:30 pm, you can choose a slightly smaller and less expensive portion. I got the lunch-sized chicken giardiniera, and it was plenty of food. If you’re skipping out on the lunch portion to move up to the full portion, the math works out that you’re basically paying an additional 10 bucks for an extra chicken cutlet, which you might not need in that one seating, but it might serve you well in a to-go box.

Here’s a somewhat shadowed view of the top of the Lunch-sized entrees section. You should be able to see the option for Tim’s Chicken Giardiniera.

Cooper’s Hawk’s chicken giardiniera dish is called Tim’s Favorite Chicken Giardiniera because a guy named Tim McEnery founded the restaurant (I asked our bartender who Tim was). It’s a solid dish. The chicken was tender and flavorful, swimming in a thin, buttery, and lightly vinegary sauce that clearly had some of the giardiniera brine mixed in. The pickled vegetables brought just a bit of heat, but the dish wasn’t overly hot in the spice department. The mashed potatoes—named on the menu as Mary’s potatoes—were super smooth, creamy, and complemented the dish well.

Overall, I really enjoyed Tim’s favorite chicken giardiniera, and as per usual, for a guy who runs a sandwich blog, I started thinking of how I could convert it or something very similar into a sandwich.

Turning the dish into a sandwich

Most of the time, a sandwich includes bread—not counting the last sandwich I wrote about—and for this one I wanted to go with my wife’s most requested burger or sandwich bun recipe that I bake. This part of the sandwich is wholly unrelated to the dish that I was served at Cooper’s Hawk, but this bun is a great vessel for a chicken sandwich, which leads us to the star of the show. I chose to use chicken breast halves to create thinner cutlets, but if you wanted, you could use boneless thighs as well. The chicken is coated in a Parmesan and Panko breadcrumb crust and then fried until crispy in a bit of oil to give the sandwich a bit of texture and crunch.

I painted a Bee Pee Cee Gee sandwich to use as fake marketing for this sandwich blog post.

I made a batch of my own pickled giardiniera and chopped that up very finely to be used in a Parmesan giardiniera butter, which was used for toasting the bun. Swiss cheese (and more Parmesan) was layered on top of the chicken and broiled lightly to get melty. Then finally a bit more giardiniera was spooned onto the sandwich as a pickled textural element to make things more fun to eat.

Bee-Pee-Cee-Gee: Breaded Parmesan Chicken Giardiniera sandwich.

Now that we know what sandwich we’re making, we need to get started on the individual components.

Honey wheat buns

I make a lot of bread. I think most of what I have made and shared is pretty good. But my wife is typically indifferent about most of it. She’s not a bread person. She thinks it’s all just fine and she’ll eat it, but she actually requests my honey wheat buns whenever we’re planning a burger night or making something like grilled chicken sandwiches for dinner. So, I will bake them in an attempt to make the crowd happy.

This particular bun has a touch of sweetness that comes from the honey in the recipe, which will help to give the exterior a nice caramel browning. I wouldn’t say that sandwich bun is overly sweet, though. For me, it’s just the right amount to create a brown bun and offset the salt that is added to the dough.

This recipe makes 6 buns. Shape them into balls, flatten into disks, and let them do their thing for an hour or so.

An hour later, all of the shaped dough pieces are doubled in size and ready to be baked.

The buns turn a nice shade of brown, due to the honey and also the addition of whole wheat flour.

Much like some of my other burger bun recipes, this dough requires both potato flour and dry milk powder. These are both helpful in creating a soft bun that has a slightly longer shelf life due to the moisture in the finished, baked buns.

Basting each bun with melted butter after the baking process will help to create a softer bun exterior as well as contributing a bit more buttery flavor to the finished sandwich buns.

Just like my burger buns, these honey wheat sandwich rolls also get painted with melted butter when they come out of the oven.

Six honey wheat sandwich rolls ready for duty.

After the butter is painted on, the buns will be very shiny, but that should fade to a more matte finish as the moisture in the butter evaporates into the air.

Here’s my honey wheat sandwich roll recipe, but if you don’t want to make your own rolls, you can just use your favorite store-bought burger buns. Mine are better, though. You should make mine.

Non-breaded simple version of a chicken giardiniera sandwich

This sandwich was just for fun. After I had baked some buns, I had a couple of chicken thighs in the fridge and a fresh batch of giardiniera. 15 minutes later, I had sautéed the chicken thighs, toasted the bun, melted some cheddar cheese on top of the chicken, and turned it into this glorious sandwich.

This could very easily be THE chicken giardiniera sandwich. It’s got everything: the tender meat, toasty bun, and a slight amount of spice that brings a lot of depth and texture to the sandwich.

I seared two boneless chicken thighs in just a bit of olive oil and seasonings.

This wasn’t the same sandwich I’m writing about today, but it was very good.

After the random weekday sandwich was complete, we moved on to making something more similar to the Cooper’s Hawk chicken giardiniera dish.

Homemade giardiniera

If you’ve never experienced it, giardiniera—sometimes shortened to giard, pronounced as jard—basically refers to a batch of pickled vegetables. Where I live, in Chicago, giardiniera is a really big deal.

The word giardiniera comes from the Italian language, and in Italy they do serve a relish of pickled vegetables that were originally created as a way to preserve their gardens for the colder seasons. Traditional Italian giardiniera is similar to the kind that you’ll find in Chicago and possibly throughout some of the Midwest; it might just be that some of the vegetables used are different from the kind of giard you’d find in Chicago. In the United States, giardiniera isn’t something you’ll find consistently across the country (it’s getting there, though).

I like J.P. Graziano brand giardiniera. The hot version is spicy, but unless you’re eating it with a spoon, it’s not going to kill anyone.

I made the giardiniera for this sandwich, but you can buy it if you can find it where you live. If you’re in an online shopping mood, I really like J.P.Graziano brand giardiniera, which you can find online at their shop, or you can find it and other versions of giardiniera at places like Amazon.

If you’re more of a do-it-yourselfer, giardiniera isn’t hard to make, but it does take a bit of time for preparation and vegetable chopping. I’ve made my version quite a few times at this point, and I do try to write the recipe in a way that you can boil/simmer vegetables at the same time that you are prepping other vegetables in order to save a little bit of time. But if a time crunch stresses you out like they occasionally do with me, you can just chop everything before the recipe starts and keep batches of the veggies in separate bowls for use when their time comes.

Chop up the peeled carrot and half of a cauliflower into pieces that are about the same size and keep them together in a bowl.

Grab a second bowl and chop up celery and a red bell pepper into similarly sized pieces as the carrot and cauliflower.

Then the pickled options come together in the form of pepperoncini, olives with pimento in the middle, and a few pickled jalapeño slices.

The three different batches of vegetables are staged in such a way and added into the simmering liquid in the proper order due to their thickness and time for each veggie to soften. The hardest vegetables, like carrot and cauliflower, are woody, and they benefit from a bit longer to cook to a point where they will still be a little firm, but softened to resemble the textures of the other vegetables. All of the pickled vegetables go in last because they have gone through a process that softens them already. Just follow the schedule in the recipe, and you should be all good on the textural side of things for your finished giardiniera.

These are the diced-up pickled vegetables that go in at the last moment since they should be fully softened.

After you turn off the heat, add the pickled vegetables and let them sit with the other veggies in the hot brine.

Drain off the liquid and add all the softened and slightly pickled veggies into a bowl with a seasoned, oil-focused dressing.

Giardiniera is typically pickled and then packed in a jar with oil, which keeps the pickles moist and creates a tiny bit of pickly and oily “sauce” when you spoon out some veggies onto your sandwich or pizza.

You might be tempted to use olive oil vs. other vegetable oils to fill up the giardiniera jar to keep the vegetables covered in oil, but just know that olive oil will firm up when it gets cold and other vegetable oils will not. This isn’t a huge deal, but it does mean that your giardiniera might need to be pulled out of the fridge a few minutes before using in order for the oil to warm up slightly and decongeal.

Here’s my newest batch of giardiniera that I made last week. As of this writing, I’m about halfway through the jar.

Parmesan giardiniera butter

The original dish that I am loosely basing this sandwich on was swimming in a buttery and vinegary sauce, so I figured mixing some butter in with minced giardiniera pieces and using that to toast the sliced wheat bun could bring some of that flavor into the finished sandwich. I did not really create a standalone recipe for this giardiniera butter, but it’s basically half a stick of softened, salted butter with about a tablespoon of finely minced giardiniera mixed in.

Spread that giardiniera butter on top, then I sprinkled a little grated Parmesan cheese and broiled the sliced bun until it got a little toasty and the butter and Parmesan were all melted.

Mixing the butter with tiny diced bits of giardiniera helps to replicate the sauce from the chicken giardiniera entree that this sandwich is inspired by.

I spread a healthy amount of giardiniera butter on the bun top and bottom and then sprinkle on some Parmesan cheese.

Broil the buns for 3 to 5 minutes until the butter is melty and the bread is toasty.

Parmesan-crusted chicken cutlets

This recipe uses two chicken breast halves to create two sandwiches, which both end up being about a quarter of a pound of meat. The whole goal for how we’re treating the meat is to produce a consistently sized piece of meat, which means that the chicken will cook evenly during the frying process.

If you cook regularly, knowing how to butterfly a chicken is pretty important. Chicken breasts in the current era are pretty large, and typically I’d say they’re at least twice as large as they should be to fit one sandwich portion (your mileage may vary on this). Butterflying the chicken breast means slicing a boneless breast in a horizontal direction so that you can open it up like a book (or butterfly). This helps to ensure that a chicken breast is consistently thick, which makes it easier to cook evenly.

For this recipe, you go one step further than butterflying by cutting all the way through the split-open butterfly, which creates two breast cutlets that should be about the same size.

Here’s an animated GIF of how I can create two similarly sized cutlets from one large breast of chicken.

After you have two thinner cutlets, we need to flatten them even more, which gives them a bit more surface area to fill out a standard-size bun. To do this, I like to lay plastic wrap or a torn-up zip-top bag on top of the chicken and pound it flatter with the smooth side of a kitchen mallet. The plastic wrap keeps the mallet clean, and it will also keep little pieces of raw chicken from flying around your kitchen during the pounding process. Pound the chicken until it’s a consistent thickness from top to bottom. I shoot for between a quarter and a half inch thick.

The frying process starts with a three-stage breading situation. First, we have seasoned flour, which is all-purpose flour mixed with a bit of salt and black pepper. Then the floured meat is moved into an egg wash consisting of just one egg whisked very well. Once each cutlet is fully moistened by the egg, move it into a mixture of Panko breadcrumbs, grated Parmesan cheese, salt, and black pepper.

Now your cutlets are both ready to fly and you can let them rest for 5 or 10 minutes while you get the oil ready for frying.

The three-stage breading process for my breaded Parmesan chicken cutlets.

After the breading process is complete, let the cutlets rest while you prep the frying situation.

This probably wouldn’t taste very well at this point, but once fried it’ll be glorious. Trust me.

When it’s time to fry, set up a pan with about half an inch of oil that you’ve heated up to 350 F. At this point, if you actually pounded the chicken, it should almost cover the meat, but not quite. Fry the breaded cutlets for 3 minutes per side and then remove to a cooling rack over paper towels to hopefully remove just a bit of the excess hot oil.