Chicken piccata with tomatoes and olives

A summery take on this one-pot Italian-American classic

Hello! Welcome back! Skip all the rambling and scroll right to the bottom of this post for a printer-friendly PDF of the recipe only.

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Hello, friends, and happy Saturday! If you can’t tell, I’ve fully shifted into summer mode. Tomatoes, stone fruit, zucchini, and watermelon are becoming cornerstones of my diet, and I am building as many meals as I can around fresh, in-season produce. Why don’t I add some tomatoes to it? I ask myself as I head to the store to pick up supplies for dinner.

Why don’t I, and why don’t you? And if you’re so inclined, may I suggest today’s recipe? It’s a summery take on chicken piccata that’s bursting with tomatoes and olives, along with the dish’s usual suspects.

I know it’s an Italian-American dish, but eating it outside with my husband and daughter, shaded from the sun under a big umbrella as we dragged hunks of buttered crusty baguette through the sauce between bites of the chicken (fine, my daughter did not participate in the chicken), I found myself feeling a little bit like I was in the south of France. A very good feeling, if you ask me.

Tell me more

I started testing this recipe last summer, when the idea occurred to try making a one-pan chicken dish that was swimming in a sauce of fresh tomatoes. I could never quite get it right — I was using chicken thighs, and no matter what I did, the skin always ended up kinda soft and gross, the tomatoes too collapsed and cooked.

Once the weather warmed up I decided to try again, this time with thinly sliced chicken breasts. Quicker to cook, so the tomatoes won’t overcook, and no risk of soggy skin since they’re skinless. Then I thought of chicken piccata — a one-pan chicken cutlet dish with an unctuous lemon, caper, and white wine cream sauce that I remember ordering quite frequently at Olive Garden growing up.

The result was exactly what I had been dreaming of. Olives were added to the mix and omitted the cream (as some recipes for chicken piccata do) because I wanted something light and summery. It’s only 10 ingredients and takes about 30 minutes to make in just one pan. My kinda meal.

Before we start

• I always give credit where credit is due, so I have to call out one of my OG Food Network idols here, Giada de Laurentiis. I looked to her classic chicken piccata recipe for inspo when I started testing this.

• I know not everyone lives in California where the tomatoes are already tomato-ing. If the tomatoes at your local market aren’t the most tasty, this is still a great way to use them — cooking them will help bring out the best of them.

• For the chicken cutlets, you can buy thinly sliced chicken breasts at the grocery store (sometimes labeled as cutlets), or you can buy boneless skinless chicken breasts and make the cutlets yourself. To do this, you will butterfly the chicken breast, which involves cutting it horizontally, then cut it in half. See this tutorial by J. Kengi Lopéz-Alt. This time around, I bought butterflied chicken breasts at the Whole Foods butcher counter and cut them in half.

• I served this with a baguette, butter, and steamed broccoli, plus this bottle of Provençal white wine (soooo good), which I also used in the recipe. I picked it up at Whole Foods, too.

The recipe

Note: recipe videos are posted on my Instagram.

Serves: 4

Cook time: 30 minutes

Ingredients: