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.

The other day I talked about roasting a couple of chickens, one for that night’s meal and the other for something else later in the week. The first night we ate part of one chicken as our main meal with a few side dishes, the next night I used the leftovers from that chicken to make my Penne with Chicken & Peas in Cream Sauce.

The day after that I needed to do something with the other roasted chicken so while looking through my February 2007 edition of Bon Appetit, I found a Chicken and Hominy Soup recipe in their “Fast Easy Fresh” section and it was fast, easy and delicious.

A couple of changes I made to the recipe were substituting crushed tomatoes for the canned petite tomatoes and using regular paprika instead of smoked paprika. If I had those other ingredients on hand, I would have used them and they may have given the soup a different flavor but my version came out just fine.

This is one of those meals that can be made into a shortcut meal by purchasing a store-bought roasted chicken. I use them all the time if I’m not in the mood to cook and they really aren’t too costly especially if you can get two meals out of one chicken and use the bones to make chicken soup.

One of the keys to this recipe is once the meat is removed from the chicken, take your time and shred the chicken meat by hand. It will be tempting to quickly cut the chicken up with a knife and I’m sure the taste will be the same but you’ll loose something in texture and mouth feel. This is a much better recipe if you take the time to shred the chicken by hand.

The recipe also suggests serving with tortilla chips, avocado and/or sour cream as toppings. All great suggestions but trying to loose a few holiday pounds I opted not to. If I were serving this to guests as a starter or even main course with a salad, I would definitely serve the side toppings.

Chicken and Hominy Soup

Ingredients

3 tablespoons olive oil
3 bunches green onions, sliced
4 teaspoons ground cumin
2 ½ teaspoons paprika
10 cups chicken stock
1 – 14 ½ ounce can crushed tomatoes
1 roasted chicken, meat removed and shredded
Hot pepper sauce, to taste
3 – 15 ounce cans hominy in juice, white or golden
1 cup FRESH cilantro chopped
Salt, to taste

How to Make Chicken and Hominy Soup at Home

10 cups of chicken stock is a lot so be sure to use a big soup pot to make this recipe. I actually started out with too small a pot and had to transfer everything over to my soup pot.

Heat your soup pot over medium-high heat, add oil and when hot, add the green onions, cumin and paprika. Sauté for about 5 minutes and then add the chicken stock, tomatoes WITH juice, chicken meat and a teaspoon or two of hot pepper sauce. You can add more of the hot pepper sauce toward the end if you want it spicier but it’s easier to add less now than suffer from adding too much.

Using a food processor or blender, puree the hominy with juice until smooth. Add the hominy to the soup and bring it all to a boil. As soon as it comes to a boil, lower heat and simmer for 15 minutes.

Add the cilantro, taste and adjust with salt and hot pepper sauce. One thing you might not realize is it is very difficult to adjust seasonings when the soup is as hot as it is at this point. Over a certain temperature, you taste buds are not that effective.

 I recommend you either wait until the soup cools down a little before adjusting the seasonings or have salt and pepper or hot pepper sauce on the table and let the individual eating the soup make the adjustment. Just be sure to tell them it may need salt.

This recipe is very similar to my Tortilla Soup with Shredded Chicken that you can find on my web site. In fact, I think that one has a little more interesting flavor that this one although it does take just a little longer to prepare.

What to do with leftover roasted chicken breasts?

I roasted a couple of chickens the other night and will write about roasting chickens another time.  I thought as long as I was roasting one whole chicken; I might as well roast two and use the meat from the second chicken for something else. And as long as I was going to roast chicken, I might as well roast a bunch of vegetables too.

We ate part of the first chicken one night with the vegetables and wanted to use the leftovers for another meal so I looked to see what I had in my refrigerator and pantry and decided to make a Penne with Chicken & Peas in a Cream Sauce. I basically had everything I needed in stock thus avoiding another trip to the supermarket.  Not that I don’t enjoy hanging out in the supermarket but two or three times a week is enough.

I put together a recipe and it was good but thought it needed a little more flavor help so I wrote to my friend Chef Ricco, who happens to be working in India right now starting a restaurant, and asked what I could have done to make this recipe better. The recipe below is a combination of what I came up with and Chef Ricco’s suggestions.

Roast Chicken Alternatives

If you don’t feel like roasting whole chickens, you can either buy already roasted chickens at the supermarket or use uncooked chicken breasts that you cook in the pan yourself. The advantage of cooking raw chicken is extra flavor you’ll get from sautéing the chicken (see fond on my Pan Sauces page).

I hope you enjoy it and please write and make your own suggestions or comments.

Penne with Chicken & Peas in a Cream Sauce
Serves 2

1/2 lb. penne pasta, cooked to al dente
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoons butter
2 thin slices from a large red onion, diced
1/2 red bell pepper, finely diced (Ricco suggested using roasted red peppers for more flavor and adding them toward the end of the recipe)
¼ cup white wine or brandy
1 chicken breast, cut up into pieces (cooked or uncooked)
1 cup half and half
1 pinch nutmeg
1 tablespoons fresh chopped parsley
1 cup frozen peas
Grated cheese like Parmigiano or Romano or you could even try some crumbled Roquefort cheese.
Freshly ground pepper, to taste
Salt, to taste

How to Prepare at Home

Heat a large saucepan over medium heat until hot. Add the oil and butter. When hot but not smoking, add the onion and diced pepper. Sauté until the onion is translucent.

Deglaze the pan with the white wine or brandy and continue cooking until most of the wine has cooked off. This will add another layer of flavor.

Season the already cut up cooked chicken with some freshly ground pepper and add it to the pan to reheat for about one minute.

Add the half and half, nutmeg, parsley and peas being sure to mix together with a wooden spoon. Raise the heat to medium-high but as soon as the half and half comes to a boil, lower the heat to medium or medium-low and reduce the sauce to desired consistency (thickness).

When the sauce is just the way you like it, add some freshly grated cheese or try the crumbled up Roquefort. Taste and adjust the seasoning with salt and pepper.

Drain the pasta but reserve a few tablespoons of the pasta water to add to the sauce if the sauce appears to be too thick. This thins out the sauce while giving it a little flavor from the cooked pasta.

Add the pasta to the saucepan; toss well and serve.

Uncooked Chicken Method

If you are using uncooked chicken, you’ll start by sautéing the chicken first, before the onions and peppers. So cut up the chicken into bite sized pieces and sauté them in butter and olive oil.  Cook until almost done but not all the way. You can finish cooking the chicken when you return it to the pan otherwise you risk overcooking it.

Remove the chicken from the pan, add the onion and pepper and follow the rest of the recipe above.

An alternative would be to sauté the chicken breast whole, let it rest while you are making the sauce and cut it up just before adding it back to the pan. I don’t think it makes much difference but if you try it both ways, please let us know which you like better.