What Can I Make with Bread and Chicken?

Chicken breast is the leanest common meat, and that is the problem every dish in this family is solving. Without fat it dries out fast and tastes of very little, so it needs either a crisp coating that adds texture and browning, or a sauce that puts moisture back. Bread turns out to be capable of both jobs — as crumbs it becomes the coating, and as a slice or a loaf it becomes the vehicle.

The katsu sando is the clearest expression of the first approach. A pounded cutlet is coated in panko, which is coarse, flaky and dry, and fries into a shatteringly crisp shell that seals the meat and keeps it juicy. It is then put between two slices of soft, crustless milk bread — an odd-sounding choice until you eat one, because a soft bread lets the crust be the only crunchy thing in the sandwich. A crusty roll would compete with it.

Iskender takes the opposite route entirely. There the bread is cubed and used as a bed, deliberately soaking up tomato sauce, yoghurt and melted butter from the chicken above. Nothing is crisp; the bread job is absorption. Naan alongside a garlic butter chicken does the same thing in a simpler form.

Pounding is the technique worth taking from all of these. Flattening a chicken breast to an even thickness means it cooks in a few minutes without the thin end overcooking, and it produces a wider, thinner cutlet with a much better ratio of crust to meat.

Custrd matches the chicken and bread you have against tested recipes and shows what else each one needs.