Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Veal parmigiana has been one of my comfort foods for a long time. Veal used to be a lot more common in stores and restaurants, before ethical concerns about industry practices made it much less popular around about 1990. Back in the 80s I enjoyed it about once a month. Heck, there was a time when Burger King sold a fast-food veal parmigiana sandwich! Nowadays I go about two years between dishes. Thus when I saw veal scallopini in the grocery store earlier this week, my first idea was I can make veal parmigiana!



The first step with veal parmigiana is to bread the veal before cooking it. The picture above shows my prep setup. The process starts from the left, with the thinly sliced veal, and goes counterclockwise. I dredge the meat in flour with a bit of salt, coat it in a mixture of 1 egg mixed with 2 tbsp. (30 mL) water, toss it in a mixture of breadcrumbs and freshly shredded Parmesan cheese, then lay it out on a plate covered with wax paper to await cooking.

BTW I'm not so much following a specific recipe here as going by experience. When I worked in a restaurant as a teenager one of several positions I worked was the fry line. It was hot, sweaty, dirty work, but I enjoyed it. One upshot is that I know how to season, batter, and fry meat!

Here's what the breaded meat looks like:



BTW I did consider other dishes to make with veal scallopini. There are classic sauté recipes with light sauces made with white wine or red wine. I even thought about making saltimbocca, though that's made by adding pork, which Hawk won't eat. None of them tickled my fancy quite as much as this old comfort food, veal parmigiana. As a plus it's kind of one of Hawk's comfort foods, too. And double-plus, making it by hand for the first time ever was satisfying.

Next I pan-fried the breaded veal.



I've got a left-to-right workflow showing in this picture, too. On the left I'm frying a few strips of meat at a time in a skillet with plenty of butter. In the center I've set a wire rack over a plate to hold cooked strips and let them drain while the rest are cooking. On the right is a baking dish I'll layer all the meat in once it's fried. I've already got a layer of marinara sauce in it, to prevent the meat from sticking to the bottom.

BTW2, the left-to-right assembly lines I'm showing here aren't just something I ginned up for photography. This is how I work when I'm cooking something that involves more than about 2 steps. It's another bit of learned experience from restaurant work decades ago.



Once the meat is cooked I layer it in the baking dish with more marinara sauce and a good layer of shredded mozzarella cheese on top, then put it in the oven to bake.

Baking time is kind of arbitrary. The meat's already cooked to a safe temperature from the sauté step. The baking stage is there to heat the sauce and cheese to a consistent temperature and get a nice, melt-y texture and golden-brown color on top.



Oh, yeah.

And here it is on the plate, with the rest of Thanksgiving dinner:



Yes, it was delicious.

It was even good the next day as leftovers. It didn't last past lunch on Friday.