The Chicken Milanesa was the best dish at CiUDAD, a Latin American fusion restaurant Diane and I used to go to even though we totally could not afford it. The key to the dish was the roasted garlic-ancho sauce. We tried to reverse engineer it several times when we lived in LA, but never came up with something quite like it. Years later, long after CiUDAD had closed, I contacted the manager of the restaurant that had replaced CiUDAD—it was a long-shot but I thought maybe they would at least have some information on the dishes of the former restaurant (which had been owned by the same owners as the new restaurant.)
The manager of the new restaurant responded–sadly he had no information on the old recipes. But months later, he contacted me again. He came across an old binder in the back office, and it turned out it contained all of the old recipes. He was more than happy to copy down the recipe and share it with me. What I hadn’t expected (but should have!) was that the restaurant version of the recipe was designed to make extraordinarily huge amounts of the sauce. The following recipe is my own adapted, significantly reduced version (resulting in 1/10th of the volume of the original.) Even reduced, this recipe still makes approximately a quart of the sauce—but this is a good thing, because the sauce is so good that you’ll want to make large quantities of it to save anyway.
Chicken a la CiUDAD
Recipe Type: Entree
Ingredients
- For Sauce
- 1/3 Onion, sliced
- ½ Guajillo Chile, stemmed and seeded
- 1.5oz Tomato paste
- ½ Ancho Chile
- 1 Roma Tomato, halved
- 1 Garlic Clove
- 20 oz Chicken Stock
- 2 Tbsp Olive oil/ canola blend
- ½ lb Butter, cut in cubes
- 3 oz Heavy Cream
- 1 sprig fresh Oregano
- 1 oz Dried Mexican Oregano
- 1 sprig fresh Thyme
- 6.5 oz Roasted Garlic
- For Chicken:
- Chicken breasts—one per person
- 2 cups breadcrumbs (optional, use for authentic Argentinian Milanesas)
Instructions
- Place a deep rondo on high heat.
- Add the onions, garlic cook until they start caramelize.
Add the chiles, tomato paste, roma tomatoes or tomato scraps cook for 5 minutes.
Add the chicken stock, simmer for one hour on medium high heat.
Add the cream, butter ,and the reminding ingredients.
Puree (use blender) and strain using the fine colander.
Salt and pepper to taste.
Notes
The above sauce was originally served over Argentinian chicken milanesas—chicken breasts pounded very flat and lightly breaded, then fried. It also works well over sauteed, non-breaded chicken breasts, or even a rotisserie chicken. Side dishes at CiUDAD included asparagus spears and the green mashed potatoes which also appear in this book.
Note 2: the roasting of the garlic is missing here.
