[halb]

I occasionally visit a local pizza place that also serves Italian dishes. When you order chicken parm or chicken Milanese, the breaded chicken is this 8 inch round 1/4" thick perfectly round disk slapped on the plate. It's obviously processed chicken that they purchased that way. Other than being pretty shabby for those dishes, what the heck would it be used for? I've searched the usual chicken sources like Tyson and can't find anything like it.

 

[teamfat]

Perhaps it is bulk ground chicken that they press into patties in-house.

mjb.

 

[sgsvirgil]

Chicken patties are made a few ways. One way that I know of is what teamfat said - ground chicken pressed into a patty. It could be done in house or at the plant.

The other is the chicken is turned into a paste and then poured into mold. This is essentially the same process used to make chicken nuggets. If the pizza joint bought the patties pre-processed as patties, there is a good chance the paste and mold technique was used.

 

[halb]

They have to be pre-processed, no question there. They buy them that way. Matter of fact a friend of mine mentioned another pizza place doing the same thing. The Milanese I saw, because there is nothing on it, has a line through the center where it was apparently folded in half. My question is really why would anyone make something this big and for what? This can't be the intended use. It's pretty bad if a place can't make their own breaded cutlets for these dishes. I'm betting they both deal with Sysco or another supplier that is pushing these things. I know the owner of the place I go to and I don't want to seem like I'm criticizing his food by asking him about his UFOs.

 

[Pat Pat]

Is the chicken ground like the others said?

At a place I used to work at, we pound chicken in a ring mould to get it nice and round for one of the dishes. We didn't make it 8" big though.

 

[halb]

I didn't have it (my wife did) but I didn't get the impression that it was ground chicken.
Maybe if you triple butterfly one of those 1 lb chicken breasts and run it over with a steam roller.

 

[teamfat]

Just for grins ( or groans ) do some searches on 'mechanically separated chicken'

mjb.

 

[kuan]

They may pound it, cut it, save the scrap for something else?

 

[halb]

But why bother making it perfectly round? Using these is recent with them, probably within the last year or so. They used to butterfly a breast and pound it. It wasn't quite as large as this thing and hardly round. But I remember once when I had their chicken parm I got a piece of woody or rubber chicken. Not unexpected with those large breasts. Maybe they complained to their supplier and they said we have these things?

 

[chefbillyb]

Take a 8 OZ Boneless skinless chicken breast and butterfly it. It will make a hell of a good size chicken cutlet after pounding. I've never seen anything prefab that looks like that.

 

[halb]

Yup. It's really not hard to do it the right way.