How long to cook chicken cordon bleu in convection oven

Chicken Cordon Bleu 3 Ways: A Recipe Review

Chicken cordon bleu — the dish that you likely had growing up, and you either love it or are completely indifferent towards it. This dish has a very mysterious origin: depending on what source you read it’s either French or Swiss, with possibly a Russian influence and popularized in America. But Wikipedia says Swiss, so let’s go with that.

So, what is a chicken cordon bleu anyways? It’s ham and cheese wrapped in chicken, breaded, and then baked or fried. That kind of sounds like something Epic Meal Time would make (2010 what up), but it is what many would consider a classic dish. (Sidenote: chicken cordon bleu wasn’t epic enough for EMT — they made ham cordon bleu instead.)

We made our chicken cordon bleu based on New York Times’ recipe, but made a few adjustments, such as doubling the ham. We also recommend doubling the cheese (something we wish we did — this is reflected below). 

Ingredients:

• 4 boneless skinless chicken breasts

• 8 slices of smoked ham or 8 slices of smoked bacon*

• 4 ounces of sliced swiss cheese or gruyere*

• ¼ cup flour

• ½ tsp salt

• ¼ tsp pepper

• 1 large egg

• ¾ cup bread crumbs

• ¼ cup unsalted butter

• ½ cup chicken stock

• ¾ cup white wine

*Traditionally chicken cordon bleu uses ham and swiss cheese, but for the sake of experimentation and trying new things, we also wanted to try bacon (which is superior to ham) and gruyere (a non-processed cheese, but similar flavour profile) to see how they compare. 

To start, take a large chicken breast and slice it in half horizontally. This is called butterflying the chicken breast. After you have your chicken breast opened up, the next step is to flatten it so it’s easy to roll everything up. For this you have a few options:

1. Use a meat tenderizer. Place some plastic wrap or parchment paper over the chicken breast and start hammering down. Ideally you want to hammer at a bit of an angle to help the chicken breast spread out.

2. Use a rolling pin. You can either use the rolling pin like a meat tenderizer, or you can press down and roll out the chicken breast like it’s protein dough. This is a good method to ensure that you have a nice and even thickness.

3. Use your hands. Put your hands together and press down on the chicken breast like you’re performing the weirdest CPR ever. This an easy (and Trevor’s preferred) method of flattening chicken breast. It’s just chicken meat, not steel, it’ll flatten just fine with your body weight.

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Choose your weapon.

If you’ve reached this step, congrats! You’ve just created an escalope of chicken which is a very fancy and very pretentious way of saying a thin, flat piece of chicken with no bone. 

The next step is to place your ham and cheese on the flattened breast and roll it up. This can be a little tricky if you overstuff the chicken breast, or if the breast isn’t flat enough. So just be careful and pound out the breast some more if you need to and rearrange the fillings as necessary. 

To make sure that this salmonella roll stays shut until it’s time to cook, go ahead and pierce it with a few toothpicks. The final step before cooking your chicken cordon bleu is to bread it! As with any other time that you need to bread chicken, start by coating the rolls in some flour that’s been seasoned with salt and pepper, then coat with some beaten eggs, and finally coat it in bread crumbs.

Trying to get these to stay shut and hold their shape is the hardest part.

Once the stuffed chicken breast rolls have been breaded, you’re ready to cook them! We experimented with two different cooking methods for both variations of our chicken cordon bleu: pan-fry and simmer vs bake.

🐔 Mediocre Tip: This may seem like a lot of steps, but each step has a purpose. Breadcrumbs on their own don’t stick very well to chicken meat. However, breadcrumbs do stick very well to egg. Egg sticks really well to flour, and flour sticks really well to chicken meat. So there you go, breading de-mystified.

Pan-Frying & Simmering Chicken Cordon Bleu

Typically chicken cordon bleu is cooked in the oven — so when NYT’s recipe recommended to pan fry it in butter and then simmer it in liquid (chicken stock), we were intrigued.

For their method, you heat butter in a skillet over medium heat and add your chicken. For the sake of our experiment we cooked a chicken with swiss and ham and one with bacon and gruyere. Cook your chicken until it’s nice and brown on all sides, about 8-10 minutes, then add ½ cup of chicken stock to the skillet, cover, and simmer the chicken (about 10-15 minutes).

That nice crispy crust you just made? Yeah, you’re going to lose some of it during this step, but we think the thought process is that the trapped steam will help the cheese melt and cook the chicken through. 

🐔 Mediocre Tip: Don’t guess with your chicken! Use a meat thermometer to check that your chicken is cooked to the required temperature (165°F). 

NYT’s recipe also included making a sauce after, but we wanted to judge just the cooking method and not over-complicate things with a sauce. (We’ve never seen chicken cordon bleu come with a sauce, anyway!)

This was taken right before the one on the right unraveled. Woops.

Baking Chicken Cordon Bleu

Baking chicken cordon bleu is a lot less involved than pan frying and simmering. Simply put it on a baking sheet and pop it in a 400°F oven for 30-35 mins. All ovens are a bit different so be sure to check on your chicken!

🐔 Mediocre Tip: We recommend setting the oven to broil for a couple of minutes at the end to add a bit of golden brown colour to your chicken cordon bleu — if you don’t, the bread crumbs will look quite pale. (But this may really depend on the type of bread crumbs you use!)

If you look closely, you can see that we broiled them at the end to get a golden crust.

How Does Frozen Stack Up?

We bought a box of frozen chicken cordon bleu to compare it to our own creation. It was, uhh… very orange in appearance. We baked it anyways and prayed that it would taste decent. 🙏

One of these things is not like the other.

Mediocre Thoughts

👩‍🍳 Trevor: Chicken cordon bleu is one of those dishes that I’ve eaten a lot in my life. It feels like my mom made it several times a month when I was a kid, although that could just be because my perception of time was all wack when I was young. When Brittany suggested this dish I agreed, partially because of nostalgia, and partially because I had never made it on my own before. 

I’ve only ever had baked chicken cordon bleu, so I was very curious to try the New York Times’ pan fried version. I was also curious to see what difference swapping ham and swiss for bacon and gruyere would make. 

The baked version is completely adequate, and exactly the way I remember it from my childhood. The cheese was melty and the ham was, well, ham. The only thing it lacked was a nice golden crust. The pan fried version had the golden crust, but because it was simmered and then steamed, the golden crust was less of a crust and more of a soggy mess. Substituting gruyere for swiss cheese didn’t make too much of a difference in my opinion, but the bacon instead of ham did. Bacon is always going to add that extra boost of flavour that ham won’t be able to. That being said, wrapping bacon and gruyere in a chicken breast, breading it, and frying it results in a very rich dish that is begging for something acidic to cut all the fat such as a salad with a nice vinaigrette dressing. 

The results.

👩‍🍳 Brittany: It may be a coincidence that Canada’s most recent heritage minute is related to chicken, and we’re writing a post about chicken. No really, it is a coincidence — we had planned this post a while back. Anyways, back to chicken cordon bleu. To be honest, I can’t remember if I’ve ever had homemade chicken cordon bleu before. All I remember is eating the frozen stuff when I was younger — which isn’t bad, and makes a quick meal in a pinch alongside a baked potato and another vegetable. 

The frozen one we baked to compare against our homemade chicken cordon bleu was alright. A bit too radioactive orange for my liking, and definitely more salty than the ones we made. Surprisingly they didn’t skimp out on the cheese, but there wasn’t much ham in there. It was decent.

Ham vs Bacon — I prefer bacon in the chicken cordon bleu, hands down. We doubled the ham and despite that, it was just there while the bacon sang. We used applewood smoked bacon from Costco and it is 100% certified delicious. I don’t think any type of ham can beat this. Not really a fair fight, imo. Not traditional, but I don’t care.

Swiss vs Gruyere — They both worked well, I can’t say that I have a favourite. If I learned one lesson from making this it’s this: always add more cheese than the recipe calls for. Always. Since I didn’t notice a huge difference, I’d choose Swiss cheese because it’s a lot cheaper than gruyere.

Pan Fried vs Baked — I like baked. It’s less work and results in a more crispy crust. I think in a perfect world, you’d pan fry for the golden brown crust and then finish it in the oven. If you don’t have the time though, baking it and then broiling it for a bit will do just fine. 

The tl;dr of my review is: Smoked bacon. More cheese. Bake it.

Our Final Review

Taste: 5 Costco bacon strips out of 5 🥓🥓🥓🥓🥓 (3 if using ham) 

The bare bones version of this recipe has the potential to be very bland and/or too salty if you aren’t careful. In fact, the frozen version was riding the line of being too salty. Adding bacon instantly bumps the rating up to a 5/5 (especially if you use the Applewood smoked bacon from Costco #notasponsor), but regular ham and swiss is okay. 

Presentation: 4 cheese oozes out of 5 🧀🧀🧀🧀

It’s a simple dish with not a lot going on, and we respect that. When you cut into it, that’s when the magic happens! Oozing cheese makes us happy. 

Affordability: 3 shrugs out of 5 🤷🤷🤷 (depends on where you shop)

Damn, chicken be expensive. Lesson: shop around to find the best deal on chicken. We recommend Costco (#notsponsored). You don’t need a lot of ingredients for this recipe, but meat and dairy products aren’t cheap in Canada. It’s worth splurging to make this every once in a while. It’s also worth noting that this isn’t a full meal — you still need a salad/side to go with it. 

How do you like to make your chicken cordon bleu? Have you perfected making this dish? Let us know your secrets in the comments below!