Tonight’s plan is for chicken paillard with these mini gnocchi my husband picked up. I thought a creamy mushroom sauce would go well over both, so I looked up some recipes. They are all just frying the mushrooms in butter and oil and add milk/cream mixed with flour. Some salt and pepper and maybe some herbs.
It can’t be that easy, can it?
Depends on the mushrooms, but yes it can. I’d cook the mushrooms gently in the butter and oil, probably with garlic, definitely with pepper and thyme. Thyme has a magical ability to make mushroomy things mushroomier. They’ll eventually relax and ooze a mushroomy liquid into the pan, which is wonderfully umami-y. There’s a classic English ingredient known as mushroom ketchup (not like tomato ketchup, more like Worcester Sauce), which is great for enrichening gravies and soups. Your thickened creamy sauce, if based on buttery, herby, peppery mushrooms, has a lot of potential for being really rather tasty.
A dollop of Dijon mustard will change the feel quite dramatically, but can be a rather lovely direction in which to take it. English mustard would make it into a cracking sauce for a steak, I reckon, but English mustard is not for the uninitiated…
I’ve got criminis and baby bellas.
Off tangent question: Should names of meals be capitalized? Chicken Paillard? How 'bout names of mushrooms? Criminis and Baby Bellas?
Ooh, intesting. I’m inclined to say not, by and large. If a house style calls for it, I’ll do it, but otherwise I’d say it’s not really a proper noun.
Anyway: you should get decent flavour out of 'shrooms like those. One of my favourite pizza toppings is basically the thing I described for beginning the sauce: slice 'em fine, cook gently in butter and olive oil with garlic, pepper and thyme (and salt, depending on the butter you’re using). Once they’re wilted down, sprinkle on your pizza and bake it: they don’t dry out thanks to the butter and oil, and their having given up a lot of their water concentrates the flavour.
Then you can wipe out the pan with a hunk of bread…
That is a pretty standard mushroom sauce recipe. If you want, you can dress it up some by adding garlic and herbs or bacon.
Heartily concur. Bacon and mushrooms: total classic. Or pancetta, indeed.
Yes. That’s all there is to it. Maybe some thyme. But much of the most delicious foods I’ve ever had were as simple as could be, letting the quality of the ingredients used shine.
Psssssst… baby bellas and criminis are the same thing. If you don’t reap the criminis when they’re small, they grow into portabellos.
The Ukulele Lady always insists that I throw a few sliced shiitakes into my sauteed criminis, because she thinks expensive things are always better. Personally, I think cooking shiitakes smell like pee.
Oh, and if you cook the mushrooms with a little paprika and chopped onion, then add a little chicken stock, and stir in sour cream instead of milk at the end, it makes a DELICIOUS paprikash/Stroganoff sauce.
Yeah, I just read that after I typed the post because I wanted to know what the difference was. Also button mushrooms are also the same but the youngest of the bunch.
Is that true? I thought white and brown mushrooms were completely different.
I always buy criminis, because brown beats white every time. I do the same with my eggs.
Accord to Kitchn, mushrooms get darker the more aged they are. Buttons are babies and Ports are oldsters. Makes you wonder what the hell Baby Bellas are.
Y’know, it’s pretty much impossible to buy white eggs in the UK. Eggs are routinely brown here. It’s entirely a perception thing though: it was assumed (erroneously - the colour has no bearing on the contents) that brown was more wholesome, like with bread, so that’s what became popular. So much so that most people have no such opinion any more, because they’re not aware that white eggshells are a thing.
Adolescents with marketing differentiation.
Depends. Do you want to claim a provenance from the Restaurant Paillard in Paris (closed in 1930), or just the pounded-flat technique? 
Yes, it’s that easy, although I’d add my flour to the frying mushrooms for the last minute, roux-style, not mixed with the dairy later.
It can be as simple as that. My personal mushroom sauce recipe has an extra step and an extra ingredient, after frying the mushrooms I add a cup of Beef Stock, let that reduce by half before then adding the cream.
At the same time as adding the beef stock I add my secret ingredient, a dollop of Vegemite. 
No really, it nicely intensifies the Umami flavour.
I also don’t use normal flour, I add some corn flour (mixed with water) as a thickener near the end. Although I have also experimented with using Xanthan Gum as a thickener, which seems to work well.
Made the chicken in a tall sided skillet, put them in the oven to keep warm and then added the mushrooms to the same pan. Deglazed the pan with the mushroom juice. Tiny diced onions, a tablespoon of jarred minced garlic and dried thyme. Had a corner of Romano cheese rind that I threw in with the dairy that had corn starch in it (the cream and milk had the starch, not the cheese).
So easy and it so impressed the family.