Chicken paillard coated with almond flour, that is. I often just pound the chicken breasts, season with salt and pepper, and throw them on the grill, and they are terrific that way, but flouring before frying adds nice browning and another layer of flavor. Today, I’m trying almond flour instead of all-purpose flour. I had wanted to try coconut flour, but couldn’t find any in my local store.

Here’s a video of the contemporary method of butterflying a chicken breast before pounding, but some people butterfly by cutting through one side almost to the other edge, and some people simply pound the whole breast. All these methods work, and if you accidentally cut through too far, just work with the pieces you get. The point is to have meat of all the same thickness that cooks very quickly. Keep trying, though, until you can get the lovely large pieces.

The video chef is right that chicken breasts are getting bigger and bigger, so I didn’t choose the method of simply pounding the whole breast. That would take a lot of pounding, and as it was, things fell off shelves from all my pounding. If you find a package of small chicken breasts, however, I do recommend that method rather than butterflying. I had three large ones; I cut one from one side to almost the other, and I did the remaining two using the method in the video. I did not remove the tender, but included it in the paillard, adding to their final size. As you can see in my photos, I put a hole in one, but otherwise, they came out pretty well. I cut them in half before dredging in the almond flour, just to make them easier to cook and turn in the large frying pan.