Homemade chicken nuggets: How to keep the breadcrumbs from falling off

Here's recipe/tips my husband, a nugget master, uses, may be of help. Good luck!!

1. First he soaks chicken strips in a shallow dish of milk in the fridge for 30+ minutes.

2. Lift up the strip, let excess milk drip off (but not too long, you want it still to be wet) then dip the strip in a beaten egg mix and drop in your crumb/breading mix.

He uses a store-bought mix (ie, Shake-N-Bake, both bags), but to that he adds a goodly amount of plain matzoh meal. This stretches the crumb mix, allowing a thicker coating and cuts the extreme saltiness of the packaged crumb mixes. You'll find boxes of matzoh meal in your store's kosher aisle. If you wait till after Passover (Easter time, more or less) it'll often be on clearance! (I picked up 3 boxes of the stuff for $0.50/box, last April, now we're set for the year!) If you can't find matzoh meal, you can use crushed up saltine (plain) crackers, just be sure they're unsalted.

3. For the baking, take a baking sheet, cover it with aluminum foil (for easy-peasy clean up after baking, as some crumbs and fat/juice will drip down onto the sheet!) Atop this, set a wire rack or grill, ideally the grid kind (we use the same rack normally used for cookie cooling-- it's wire feet set right on top of any kind of baking sheet, rim or no rim!), so that the raw chicken pieces won't slip thru. Lastly, spray the wire rack with a light coating of Pam or other aerosol cooking spray. This helps the chicken pieces stick less & release more easily after baking.

4. So, after coating, set each piece on the grill/baking sheet and bake in an oven preheated to 350 F (175 C) for 30 minutes. If you like your chicken super-crunchy and on the slightly "drier" side like we do, you can add 5 minutes more at the end with your oven turned to "broil" (high broil). Also, note, the smaller your chicken pieces, the more crunch they'll cook up, but you'll also use more crumb coating to make them (hence the matzoh crumbs!)

5. After baking, let the chicken cool on the wire rack without disturbing for 5-10 minutes. This is crucial as the meat will be mushy/flimsy until it's proteins have cooled and coagulated (firmed up). Once cooled a bit, they should pop right off the wire rack more or less intact!

I had a similar problem when I first tried breading.

One thing that worked well for me was adding a bit of water to the beaten egg (tbs or so, not more than that). Beaten egg by itself can be thick and slippery, adding water and mixing well thins it down to a point where it sticks to the object of breading better, instead of kinda sliding off - which means more of the egg wash stays on the surface, to better moisten and bind the crumbs.

I don't know if it's relevant, but I usually don't use a flour layer under the egg wash, so I'm not sure how that would change the behavior.