The secret to an excellent chicken salad is to use roasted turkey breast. Just thought you should know.
Tonight’s dinner is chicken salad –with turkey of course– into which I mixed mayonnaise (store bought; long week), curry powder, diced apples, pickled hot peppers (homemade), scallions and a little salt and pepper.
I cut the turkey into nice sized cubes, maybe a centimeter on a side. The apple I cut brunoise, the scallions and hot peppers just diced.
You wouldn’t think about the apples and the hot peppers, but I like the sweetness that jumps out at you, and the heat from the peppers is muted by the mayonnaise. Which just means that you have to add more hot peppers, of course.
Sounds delicious. I may just try this. I like your idea of using turkey. I do love a good chicken salad prepared with actual chicken, though. It's a little tricky to use chicken breasts–getting them cooked through but still juicy, but I think it's worth the effort. At least once a year, my husband and I have chicken salad for Shabbos, but serve something else to the kids. They don't get our lust for this dish.
Most often people use soup chicken, which is always moist, but the flavor has been taken by the soup, so it leaves the meat bland. Almost as important as the turkey is to cut it into pieces that aren't going to smear into a paste.
What's not to like? It's homey, satisfying and can take a number of different flavor profiles. Curried, with apples and hot peppers, for instance ;-) And, if I had a red onion last night, that would have gone in as well. I'm not a big celery fan even when you can find normal celery here. I had a radish that would have gone in had it not been past its prime.
This was only one of the chicken salads I made last night; the other had pickles and scallions.
I make a similar curried chicken salad but I like more texture, i.e.. crunch, so I add bigger [1-2 cm] cubes of crunchy apples like Grannies, finely diced red onion [which also mellows due to the mayo], halved red grapes, and sliced celery. I aim for about half volume of chicken & half of all the add ins.
I make a similar curried chicken salad but I like more texture, i.e.. crunch, so I add bigger [1-2 cm] cubes of crunchy apples like Grannies, finely diced red onion [which also mellows due to the mayo], halved red grapes, and sliced celery. I aim for about half volume of chicken & half of all the add ins.