Chicken Salad

What to do with soup chicken

What to do with all the tasty chicken meat from the boiling hen when you have made chicken stock? This recipe for chicken salad is better with meat from a boiling hen than with a pale chicken breast. It tastes great on toast or on bread, or it can be part of a salad buffet. If you don’t have the time right now, just freeze the meat with some of the stock to prevent it from becoming too dry. First remove the skin, and feed that to the cats or dogs, they’ll love it.
Other salads on this site: Waldorf salad, Salmon salad, Parsnip salad, Garden salad.
First course or buffet platter for 6 to 8 persons; preparation 12 minutes + making chicken stock.

chicken meat from a boiling hen (about 750 gr/1½ pound)
100 gr (½ cup) raisins, rinsed
50 gr (½ cup) slivered almonds, hazelnuts or pine nuts
Dressing
1 shallot, finely chopped
1 Tbsp curry powder
2 or 3 cloves garlic, crushed
½ tsp cayenne pepper
white pepper and salt to taste
1 dl (½ cup) mayonnaise
3 Tbsp yoghurt
1 Tbsp oil

Preparation

Cut the chicken meat into small pieces. Dry roast the nuts. When using hazelnuts, chop them coarsely.
In a large bowl, mix chicken, nuts and raisins.
To make the dressing – Sauté the shallot in the oil, add chopped or crushed garlic, and after thirty seconds on a low fire add the curry. After just a few seconds more, take the pan off the fire. Let this mixture cool.
Mix mayonaise and yoghurt, add onion/garlic/curry and cayenne pepper. Taste it, then add pepper and salt if necessary.
Add the dressing to the bowl, mix well, and leave for several hours in the refrigerator.

To serve

Serve the salad at room temperature or slightly cooler, but not straight from the fridge.

If you want to make the salad with chicken breast anyway (because one doesn’t always have a boiling hen laying around), simmer it in chicken stock (from a cube if neccessary) for fifteen to twenty minutes and let it cool in the stock.

Ingredients

All descriptions of ingredients

Curry powder

This is not a spice, but a combination of spices. That means that curry powder of different brands will taste differently, and a brand can have several kinds of curry powder, like mild and spicy. Curry powder is yellow because of the use of kurkuma. Other spices that can be present are coriander, cumin, ginger, chili pepper, black pepper, fenugreek and curry leaves (leaves of the Murraya koenigii). Curry powder is not Indian in origin but british: blended curry spices were for sale in England since late eighteenth century to prepare the spicy dishes from colonial British-India. Some of these blends were tempered with ground rice or other cheap ingredients to enlarge the volume without using expensive spices. Even today, take care to buy a good brand. Curry powder is more European than Asian. For Asian curries it is customary to blend the spices yourself.

Chicken salad for leftover chicken meat from making stock
A chicken curry salad made from leftover meat from a boiling hen. So much better than store-bought salad!
© Author Christianne Muusers