A strong-flavored breading preparation designed to bread chicken and other white meats, turmeric and paprika add a touch of exoticism and make spicy lovers happy, these are accompanied by rosemary, fennel and sage, that is, the aromatic plants most used in our tradition to cook chicken.
Gratin or breading?
Gratin (a word of French origin) is a dish (meat, fish or vegetables) that has been cooked with a technique designed to cover it with a crispy golden crust but keeping a soft and more moist heart underneath. Breading, on the other hand, consists of completely covering the food to be cooked with a layer (usually breadcrumbs, perhaps brushed with egg) that will transform into a crunchy coating during cooking, so there are certainly some similarities in the result you are aiming for. Both the crust of the gratin and that of the breading depend (like others in cooking) on a series of complex chemical reactions that go under the name of Maillard reaction, from the name of Louis Camille Maillard, a French doctor and chemist who was the first to take an interest in it. Let it be clear that the scholar was not interested in gratin or breading, he was interested in the synthesis of proteins and published a study on how amino acids react with sugars, it so happens that these reactions between proteins (amino acids are the building blocks of proteins) and sugars are responsible for those brown or golden crusts that are so tasty. What use is it to us to know this? Knowing that when we cook a gratin dish we must have both proteins and sugars, this is why we usually add cheese to the breadcrumbs or flour (carbohydrates, i.e. sugars) and why if we can risk not adding it when we gratinate fish or meat focusing on the proteins already present in the dish, doing the same with a vegetable gratin is at high risk of obtaining charred vegetables.
For which recipes to use the gratin chicken breading
As we anticipated, this preparation for gratin and breading was designed to bread chicken and other white meats. It is no coincidence that if you search the web for recipes that use paprika and turmeric you will find the one for chicken with paprika and turmeric. If you scroll through these recipes you will find that some flavor the chicken only with paprika and turmeric, others add something, some garlic, some pepper, some ginger, we even saw one with cream, the point is that you can add anything to paprika and turmeric to make the chicken spicier or more spicy, in this preparation thanks to the presence of rosemary, fennel and sage the range of flavors is already so wide that you would not need to add anything and you could prepare your own breaded variant of chicken with paprika and turmeric.
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