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Celebrity chef Bobby Flay seems to have a shelf stable tip for everything. Flay’s go-to secret ingredient anchovies are a pantry staple, for example. His habit of trashing old spices helps to ensure fresher aromatics. And one of Bobby Flay’s favorite ingredients to cook with is both a pantry must and a compulsory component for one super satisfying, but relatively easy weeknight dinner: capers for chicken piccata.
Capers are great in tons of applications — served with cream cheese and lox on a bagel or tossed into salads are just a couple of enhancing examples — but chicken piccata in particular just wouldn’t be the same without ’em. Chicken piccata, which gets its flavor from little more than butter, lemon juice, salt, and pepper, is pretty basic before the addition of the salty caper bush buds. The green, olive-adjacent pearls of briny salinity are actually what separate piccata from plenty of other poultry preparations. Some might go so far as to say that a chicken piccata absent capers just isn’t chicken piccata. But the occasional recipe does list them as optional. Taste a chicken piccata with and without the traditional capers, however, and the absence of their buoyant texture and oceanic quality will be clear.
Choosing the best capers for your chicken piccata
Like a lot of pantry items, the one you have on hand is the best one to use for dinner tonight. But most chicken piccata recipes are going to call for the brined variety, like Whole Foods’ non-pareil capers. Their small size makes them ideally suited to just toss in without any extra steps, though larger options are also sold, as are salt-cured capers, which can taste more concentrated and require soaking.
Capers’ flavor is as assertive as it is inimitable. So, if you just don’t like the verdant beads, you’re going to be in the small sample size of folks who prefer to omit capers from their chicken piccata. But if you want to capture the essence of capers without their springy, crunchy texture, which can be as divisive as the aforementioned olives, you can still sneak them in. Grind a spoonful of capers finely with a mortar and pestle, or even just mash them up with a fork and whisk them into your piccata pan sauce for a taste of the sea without any choppiness.
