Southern Chicken Salad Recipe (2024)

FAQs

Is chicken salad a southern thing? ›

Early American chicken salad recipes can be found in 19th-century Southern cookbooks, including Sarah Rutledge's The Carolina Housewife: Or, House and Home (1847) and Abby Fisher's What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking (1881).

Cooked chicken breast (or leftover rotisserie chicken), creamy mayo, celery, and salt make up a basic chicken salad, but what it's really missing is an acid, something that can break through the blandness so the chicken salad can stand up to whatever bread or roll you serve it on.

Choose low-moisture ingredients whenever possible. Select boneless, skinless chicken breasts over thighs, and opt for low-sodium canned chicken when bulkier meats are called for. Soak up the moisture. Try toasting your nuts, fruits, or vegetables before adding them to the salad.

To offset the creaminess (and potentially wetness) of too much mayo, try adding in more of whatever crunchy element you were using. Celery and red onion are some of the most common ones, but you can also try chopped red peppers, bacon bits, carrots, cabbage, apples, chopped nuts, and more.

Chicken

Chicken salad / Main ingredient

Chicken is the most common type of poultry in the world. Owing to the relative ease and low cost of raising chickens—in comparison to mammals such as cattle or hogs—chicken meat and chicken eggs have become prevalent in numerous cuisines.

Wikipedia

A traditional Southern meal may include pan-fried chicken, field peas (such as black-eyed peas), greens (such as collard greens, mustard greens, turnip greens, or poke sallet), mashed potatoes, cornbread or corn pone, sweet tea, and dessert—typically a pie (sweet potato, chess, shoofly, pecan, and peach are the most ...

Overcooked or dry chicken

To ensure that your chicken salad tastes the way that it should, you should avoid using overcooked or dry chicken in your recipe. Unfortunately, as we cook chicken, the moisture of the bird slowly evaporates.

Your lunch choice may lack sufficient protein, healthy fats, and fiber to keep you feeling full and satisfied. Consider adding sources of lean protein, healthy fats (like avocado or nuts), and high-fiber vegetables to your meal to increase satiety.

When making chicken salad, should the chicken be shredded or finely cubed? That's completely up to you. It really depends on how you cook the chicken. If you boil it, then shredding would be easier and cubes for baking.

We must blame two categories of bad bacteria when things go bad for chicken salad, not mayonnaise or luck. Spoilage bacteria cause food to deteriorate and develop unpleasant odors, tastes, and textures.

How long should you keep homemade chicken salad? ›

It's tempting to stir up a big batch so that we can enjoy leftovers for a few days. But how long is it safe to keep chicken salad on hand? The short answer is to store chicken salad in a sealed container in the fridge or cooler for no more than four days.

Bad bacteria can grow rapidly in the "Danger Zone," a temperature range between 40°F and 140°F, so always transport and store chicken salad in the refrigerator or a well-chilled cooler or lunchbox.

The biggest offenders for creating a watery salad are raw or cooked watery vegetables or ingredients that have not been dried after you've washed them. To ensure they're completely dry before adding them to the salad, you will want to pat them with a paper towel or a clean, absorbent dishcloth.

Fresh herbs, roasted garlic, chipotle, Sriracha or curry powder are all amazing options, as well. You might also enjoy our garlic aioli recipe, which is very similar to this recipe, but uses egg yolks instead of whole eggs.

Add More Oil: The primary ingredients in mayonnaise are oil and egg yolks. If your mayonnaise is too thin, gradually add more oil while continuing to whisk or blend. This will increase the fat content and thicken the mixture. Be patient and add the oil slowly to avoid over-thickening.

Historically, chicken salad is not as Southern as you might think. The chicken salad that's beloved today originated in Wakefield, Rhode Island. In 1863, Liam Gray, founder of Town Meats, was the first to mix leftover chicken with grapes, mayonnaise and tarragon.

We can thank the Chinese for being the first to serve variations of “chicken salad.” Of course, these versions were far from what we are familiar with today, but the general idea was pieces of chicken mixed with a variety of spices and oils, always tied together by a binding substance.

In the video, Cleveland native Tanisha Godfrey has a chicken salad in front of her and says, “Y'all better come up here and get one of these.” Someone off camera asks her what it is, and she responds, “It's a chicken salad," then shares where she got it from ("81st Deli … superior") and what's in it.

Stacy Brown and her husband Kevin Brown founded Chicken Salad Chick in 2008 in Auburn, AL. The business idea came out of her love for making and serving chicken salad, a recipe that was passed down from her grandmother.