Parmo - a delicacy from Middlesbrough
It’s breaded chicken, smothered in cheese sauce
And grilled with extra cheese, and toppings. And it’s brilliant.
This is a terrible picture, because it’s a very old post.
The original version of this post said a lot of very mean and snobbish things about Middlesbrough, before going on to give a rather flawed parmo recipe. A number of people left some rather irate comments about both of those things.
How does the saying go: “you don’t hate Mondays, you hate capitalism?” Or possibly “you don’t hate musicals, you hate Andrew Lloyd Webber”. Something like that. In any case, what became obvious was that I do not - as it happens - hate Middlesbrough, I hated my childhood.
That’s a lot to suddenly process of the back of a blog comment where a stranger calls you a cunt, but honestly, fair play to them - it wasn’t very nice, and I didn’t even grow up there.
Nearby Darlington - where I did grow up - has had a real turnaround in recent years, and despite several visits I’d still let historic resentment get the better of me. The last time I was in Middlesbrough, itself, I collected my father’s death certificate and a stinking carrier bag full of the clothes he’d died in, had lunch at a genuinely excellent vegan café, and realised that as analogies go, bringing the baggage with me was a bit on the fucking nose.
What I did not do - and oh golly do I regret it - was have a parmo.
So instead of being shitty about a town with a fine industrial history, credible art museum, and an absolute world-tier gift to junk food, let’s just talk about the junk food.
Let’s talk about the Parmo.
What actually is a Parmo?
An equally bad picture - did I mention the original post is very old.
The Parmo is really a kind of schnitzel or escalope parmesan, tweaked for the post-pub fast food market. It's breaded, fried chicken or pork topped with a layer of stiff Béchamel sauce, then cheese, and grilled to melt. Typically it's served with cheddar or low-moisture pizza mozzarella rather than parmesan on top.
So far, so standard. Australia goes nuts for something very similar - the chicken parm.
But with a parmo, we get toppings. You heard me.
Parmo is often served in a pizza box, on top of a bed of chips, a kebab-shop Apology Salad, and toppings.
A layer of pepperoni, or mushrooms, or more or less any conventional pizza topping is relatively common. As are the takeaway-classic array of sauces: chilli, garlic, barbecue.
A little background
I can't claim any very authentic experience, and I doubt I could really hit the library for this one. But ten minutes on Google gets you the plausible origin story of an Italian-American army chef settling in Teesside and coming up with the idea in the 1950s.
It looks like Parmo was on the precipice of going commercial a few years ago, and although the fan site mentioned in the BBC article no longer exists, there's still a small factory churning them out for supermarkets, and it is apparently possible to buy one from Asda.
A lot of food
A large Parmo is reputed to weigh in comfortably over 2500 calories. I am no stranger to excess, but that gives me pause. With the toppings, the garlic sauce, and the sheer amount of wine it'll take to get through this, I feel it could take some work. I considered a certain amount of fucking about, of trying to make it somehow more classy. But it just doesn't feel right.
You could use panko breadcrumbs, a fascinating array of cheeses, make the sauce piquant and delicate, and serve it on top of some kind of dauphinois, or even as part of a thin-sliced potato tart or galette. If I wanted to be even more of a ponce, I'd bake camembert or reblochon on top of a pork or veal escalope. But that would be bullshit. Tasty, but bullshit. I am going to assume that the core concept is sound, and just try to execute it with decent ingredients.
Ingredients
2024 note: Look, it’s a fucking schnitzel with cheese sauce and toppings. At some point I’ll rewrite this properly, for now here’s the 15 year old rough notes recipe.
Chicken breasts, 1 each
Breadcrumbs, probably about 200g if you’re making 2 of these
Eggs
Cheddar cheese
Parmesan cheese
Garlic
Béchamel sauce (butter, flour, milk, seasoning)
Toppings (In this case: chorizo, jalapenos, mushrooms)
Instructions
First, make a very, very stiff Béchamel.
It's just the standard roux sauce - butter, flour, milk, but don't let it out as you would if you were making food you planned to respect and enjoy. It wants to be thick and spreadable, like a croquette filling. In this case, I also fried a little garlic in the butter.
Beat the living fuck out of some chicken. For an authentic Parmo experience, it should be flat, and with a texture that suggests only the most cursory relationship with the actual flesh of creatures. I put the chicken breasts between sheets of cling film and hit it with a rolling pin until flat.
Dip the chicken in egg, then breadcrumbs, and fry it in plenty of oil.
You probably need more breadcrumbs than you think - they don't seem to go very far.
Given the thickness, it'll cook through perfectly fine in the time it takes to brown the breadcrumbs on both sides. You can also let them finish in the oven.
When cooked, slather a thick layer of Béchamel over the chicken, then top with a mix of cheddar and Parmesan. Scatter the pizza-style toppings over the top of this, and put it under the grill to melt the cheese and finish off.
Serve with chips, salad, and a prayer to the Elder Gods that your tract might be spared.
There you go: trash schnitzel. Fuck yeah.