Flattened chicken breast fillets rolled up with lots of paprika, cooked in a pepperonata: a red pepper and onion stew.
Paprika for flavour
When you’re totally bored of chicken breast fillets, but keep buying and eating them because it’s a source of lean protein and/or an easy dinner, try something else with it. Like the flattened rolls, swirled paprika-vermillion inside.
Paprika is not, as some might think, powder obtained from a single ‘paprika pepper’. It is ground from various capsicums, sweet or chilli peppers, hence it may differ in heat. Sweet paprika is fruity and mild, while hot paprika, though not quite as fiery as some chilli powders, needs to be used judiciously. Both varieties can also be smoked, obtained from peppers dried in a smoker.
I do like to use it a lot, mainly because its heat is not all on/off like chilli. It is more difficult to add too much, and if you have jars of both sweet and hot, you can combine it to get the right fruity heat you require.
In this recipe I recommend only sweet paprika, to avoid overpowering the chicken, and to complement sweet peppers in the stew.
How to prepare the chicken rolls
This works best with medium sized chicken fillets, allocating one per person. They need to be butterflied: this lovely expression means they are sliced sideways almost to the end, then opened up to be twice as wide. With a mallet or a rolling pin flatten them until quite thin. That gives you a surface big enough to play with and when rolled up, the seasoning inside will flavour the whole chicken breast.
Seasoned with salt and pepper on both sides, the fillets should now be spread with some cream cheese and generously sprinkled with sweet smoked paprika. Then roll them back up, sideways, so they vaguely resemble a whole fillet again. Use meat pins or toothpicks to secure the rolls: while frying, they will want to unravel untidily.
They should be seared in the frying pan that will then serve as a dish for cooking the pepper stew, and obviously only outside of the chicken rolls will be cooked at this point. They will finish cooking in the pepper sauce later so place them on a plate for now.
How to make pepperonata: red pepper stew
Pepperonata is the Italian version of the French-Basque piperade, or the other way round. Both very similar and very delicious dishes of red peppers and onions, stewed with olive oil and, in the Basque version, spicy piment d’Espelette, a variety of hot paprika. Since this recipe is not using that particular piment, I call the pepper stew pepperonata here. But as with many dishes, the regional varieties sometimes differ by the name only. In short, this is a Mediterranean vegetable dish also related to ratatouille and caponata.
To cook it properly, like in the recipe below, it’s best to fry sliced peppers in olive oil first, to give them a little char in places, then remove.
Onions next need to be softened but not browned, and they make the base of the sauce with thyme, tomato puree and garlic.
The mixture will cook over low heat for a few minutes before the peppers return to the pan.
Cooking pepperonata on its own, you then simmer the dish for a while to soften the peppers. In this instance though, chicken rolls are added at this point. Since they won’t have been cooked through, the whole dish cooks for half an hour or so on low heat, for the meat to finish off and the stew to develop flavours.
Variations
More of a shortcut than a variation: you can start cooking the pepperonata from onions, adding peppers to them next, then all the other ingredients. That risks overcooking the peppers slightly but saves time.
Instead of chicken, try thinly cut and flattened pork loin. Or you can turn this vegetarian and roll up blanched slices of aubergine instead of meat.
More chicken breast recipes
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More red peppers recipe
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Piperade is the Basque take on ratatouille with the heat of espelette pepper. This recipe is easy and simple, like a lot of best things in life.