101 Ways to Make Chicken Salad

Making chicken salad on a hot summer night couldn’t be easier especially if you have leftover roasted chicken from the night before. Whether you roast the chicken yourself or buy a rotisserie chicken at your local market, one of the best ways to use up leftovers is cut it up to pieces and make chicken salad.

There must be 101 ways to make chicken salad depending on what you have on hand to toss into it. I’m sure everyone has a favorite recipe from his or her mom or great aunt but in our house, we usually go with what’s on hand or in the refrigerator and get creative.

Basically, chicken salad is chicken, chopped up vegetables; some sort of fruit and a dressing that typically has mayonnaise associated with it. A classic chicken salad could be just chicken, celery, mayo and salt & pepper. That’s it. That simple.

Instead of giving you exact recipe with measured out ingredients, I’d wanted to give you some ideas as to what you can try in your own recipe. I’m not giving you measurements because I never make the same chicken salad twice and really don’t have them. I suppose if you come up with the most amazing homemade chicken salad recipe ever, you may want to write it down so you can make it again some time.

This list is by no means exhausted but it’s a good start. I encourage you to experiment with all your favorite ingredients and if you come up with something special, add it to the comments below.

A Few Simple Suggestions

1. Don’t add too many additional ingredients. – Sometimes less is more. You want to combine various ingredients that work well together but don’t completely overpower the flavor of the chicken. They are there to add flavor, color and texture but if you put too many of them together, it will really confuse your taste buds.
2. Prepare all the non-dressing ingredients together separately from the dressing ingredients. – You want the chicken, vegetables and fruit to be balanced just like you want the dressing to be balanced. If you are simply using mayonnaise, the task is easy, but if you start adding other ingredients to the mayo, it gets a little trickier.
3. Don’t add all the dressing to the chicken mixture at one time. You don’t want to overpower the chicken with dressing. It is easier to add more than try to remove excess dressing and remember nothing is worse than an over dressed salad.
4. Customize the mayonnaise by adding ingredients that you like and will work with the rest of the ingredients.
5. Check for seasonings at the end especially salt and pepper.
6. Chicken salad makes great sandwiches, you can also serve it with a salad or on a bed of lettuce. – The art of making a great chicken salad sandwich has as much to do with the type of bread you are serving it on, but that’s a subject for another blog. Since my wife isn’t eating bread these days, we typically serve it with a salad. I eat the leftovers on bread the next day if there is any left.

Classic Chicken Salad Ingredient Suggestions besides the Chicken and Mayonnaise

Celery
Onion
Carrot
Peppers
Seedless grapes

Alternative Ingredients

Toasted almond slivers
Capers – drained
Chopped sweet pickles or pickle relish
Water chestnuts
Hard-boiled eggs, chopped
Nuts – walnuts, pecans, cashews, pine nuts, sesame seeds
Fruits- apple slices, pear, raisins, cranberries, craisins, tomato, avocado, olives, mandarin oranges, cherries
Vegetables – asparagus, cucumber,
Cheese – hard cheese, grated or thin slices of soft cheese

Mayonnaise Additions

Herbs – basil, parsley, tarragon, chervil, chives, sage, mint
Spices – ginger, dry mustard, honey mustard, paprika, oregano
Chutney
Jam or preserves
Honey
Citrus juice – lemon, orange, grapefruit
Peanut butter
Vinegar
Soy Sauce
Hot Sauce
Maple syrup
Yogurt

What Are Your Favorite Ingredient Combinations

Let me know how you like your chicken salad in the comments section below.

I needed a quick meal the other night and I wanted to use up some left over roasted chicken from the night before. I was thinking risotto but I didn’t have any in the pantry but I did find a box of San Giorgio orzo and thought this might work.

What is Orzo?

Orzo is rice shaped pasta slightly smaller than a pine nut and is great in soups and pasta salads. See my seafood orzo salad recipe.

Find Recipes In All the Right Places

I love finding recipes and adapting them with ingredients I have on hand. Keep your eyes open and you can find interesting recipes everywhere; on product packages, the supermarket shelves, ads in magazines, newspaper articles, mail flyers. Most of these recipes are trying to sell you their products but they are still good starting points for creating your own recipe.

The orzo box was no exception. They had a recipe for Mediterranean Orzo Pilaf. Some of the ingredients were processed products like dried Italian seasoning, bouillon cubes, and garlic powder. It’s my opinion you can really change the quality of mediocre recipe just by using higher end products that really don’t cost you that much more money in the end.

For example, using homemade or quality chicken stock instead of bouillon can make all the difference in the world. Try using fresh garlic instead of garlic powder or fresh basil and parsley rather than dried Italian seasonings.

Dried herbs are great in some dishes, but with a pilaf recipe like this, why not go fresh if you can. If you don’t have fresh herbs in your refrigerator, by all means go with the dried ones but make sure they have not been sitting in the cabinet too long. I don’t date my dried spice bottles, but I should because I’m sure some of them have been around longer than my daughters. Chef Ricco forgive me.

I made the chicken stock the night before when we had roasted chicken. I’ll be honest.  I didn’t roast the chicken. It was a rotisserie chicken from our local market and a pretty good one at that. After I stripped the meat off, I stuck the carcass in a pot, covered it in water and made a quick stock in about an hour. Not classic chicken stock but good enough for what I wanted to use it for and a heck of a lot better than anything canned and lets not even talk about a bouillon cube.

You can make this dish one hundred different ways by substituting various ingredients. Don’t like chicken, add shrimp. Don’t like parsley, try cilantro.  Try different types of cheeses, olives, nuts; whatever works for you or you happen to have in your pantry.

Experiment and have some fun. There are some recipes you must follow a precise technique using specified ingredients. This is not one of them.

Quick Orzo Pilaf

Ingredients

2 tablespoons butter
8 ounces uncooked Orzo
1 clove of garlic, minced
1 small onion, chopped fine
2 ½ cups chicken stock
12 or more grape tomatoes, cut in half
1 cooked boneless chicken breast, meat shredded or cut into pieces
Salt & pepper, to taste
½ cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese.

How to Make Orzo Pilaf at Home

Heat a large sauce pot or fry pan over medium high heat. Add the butter and melt. Add the onions and cook for a couple of minutes. Add the orzo and cook with the onions & garlic for 3 to 4 minutes, stirring frequently so the orzo doesn’t burn. If the pan seems too hot, turn down the heat to medium.

While this is going on, I like to heat up the chicken stock so I’m not adding cold stock to the hot pan with the orzo. No reason to slow down the cooking process by cooling down a hot pan.

Add the chicken stock to the pan and bring it to a boil. Lower heat and simmer uncovered for about 10 minutes while the orzo absorbs the stock. Be sure to stir every so often.

Add the grape tomatoes, chicken and parsley. Season with salt and pepper and then cover and cook for a few more minutes until all the stock has been absorbed into the orzo. Be sure to stir so the orzo doesn’t stick to the pan.

I like stir in the grated Parmesan cheese at the end just before serving. You can add a sprig of fresh parsley to the plate to make it look nice. I always forget.

Chicken Goulash - Not Really

I received an email from Marisa who said she has “made a lot of dishes that are good but not great” and “know they could be improved by adding some of this or doing a little of that” so I invited her to send me a recipe to “fix”.

So what recipe did she send me  - her Hungarian mother-in-law’s recipe for Chicken Goulash? And we all know what a great idea it is to muddle with one’s mother-in-law’s recipes! Marisa even said, “It’s always a dangerous proposition to mess with a mother-in-law’s recipe, but I’m willing to take the risk in the name of culinary advancement.”
The problem with her recipe she said is the “sauce is always very watery, even if I barely cover the chicken (as directed).  Also, the flavor is nice, but it lacks a certain something. “

As part of my brand new Ask a Chef feature, I sent her recipe to Chef Ricco to get his opinion knowing he’s always ready to talk about a recipe and how to make it better along with adding a few interesting comments. The first thing Ricco said to me was “there is no such thing as Chicken Goulash, goulash is made from beef.”

Marisa’s husband’s Hungarian mother’s recipe is called Paprikas Csirke pronounced (PAH-pree_kash CHEER-kah). Chef Ricco also questioned the recipe only calling for 2 chicken thighs and wanted to know if this recipe was for one person? Actually he said a child but we don’t need to go there.

So first I’ll post Marisa mother-in-law’s recipe and then Chef Ricco’s. You will see a big difference in the list of ingredients in addition to the cooking technique.

And to see Chef Ricco’s classic Beef Goulash recipe….

Marisa’s Recipe

Ingredients:

2 chicken thighs (remove skin and the fat), cut into two pieces each
2-3 onions, chopped
1 red pepper, chopped
1-2 cloves of garlic
1 tablespoon sweet paprika
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 tablespoon tomato paste
2 chicken bouillon cubes 

Preparation:

Warm the oil in a cooking pot and add to it the onions, garlic and red pepper. From time to time mix them up till they turn to golden. Add the thighs, paprika and tomato paste, mix every thing. Cook the thighs till the flesh becomes white (three to five minutes)

Only then add water (not much - just enough to cover the thighs) plus the chicken cubes. Cover the pot, reduce the flame (after the water boiled) and cook for 1 hour.

Chef Ricco’s Recipe for Paprika Csirke

Ingredients

3 tablespoons oil
2 large sweet Spanish onions (course chopped)
2 green peppers (course chopped)
3-4 cloves garlic (fine chopped)
3 fresh plum tomatoes (course chopped)
3 Tab sweet Hungarian paprika (very important)
Salt and Pepper to taste
6 chicken thighs (skinless)
3 cups chicken stock
 
Heat oil in a heavy bottom pot, over low heat. Add onion, cook over low heat until golden brown.
Add green peppers and garlic, cook for 5 minutes. Add paprika and cook for 3-4 minutes.
 
Add the chicken and cook for 5-7 minutes. Add fresh tomatoes, salt and pepper cook for 5 minutes.
 
Add chicken stock and bring to boil. When it comes to a boil, turn down heat to simmer. Simmer until done, about 45 minutes.
 
Ricco revealed if Marisa feels the sauce is to watery, she should remove the chicken and “crank up the heat and reduce the sauce.”

He also explained this dish normally starts by cooking cured fatty bacon in the oil and finishes by folding sour cream into the braising liquid right before serving. Two great options to give this recipe even more flavor.

Chef Ricco likes to serve this with Spaetzle and would be more than happy to provide a recipe if anyone is interested.