I honestly, really, truly don't understand people who prefer white meat to dark meat. Dark meat tastes better and is moister. This is a simple fact. The only thing white meat has going for it, objectively, is that it's lower in fat. It's also somewhat easier to make boneless, so if you're doing the boneless breast thing, you get a lot more meat in a single coherent lump than if you're doing the boneless thigh thing. When fast food places brag about their "all white-meat chicken strips" or whatever, I laugh. At least it's "all chicken", and not chicken food product.
Anyway, Chrissy agrees with me about dark meat, although she's not as vocal about it. As a result, whenever I cook a whole chicken (which is very satisfying, smells great, and I've got a lot of good recipes for it), I typically end up with a lot of breast meat left over. As we've already discussed, I'm not too fond of breast meat. It's not too bad, especially when it's just been cooked and you cooked it well. When I roast or grill a chicken, the breasts stay moist (sounds dirty, doesn't it?) and are pretty good. Just not as good as thighs. And afterward, they dry out a bit and just get boring.
The answer? Chicken Salad. This stuff rocks.
What's in a good Chicken Salad? Chicken (duh!), Binder, Crunch, Flava.
Chicken: self explanatory. Cut it into 0.5" to 1.0" cubes, more or less. It's best to do this the day after you cook the chicken, because that gives the juices time to run out of the meat. That makes the chicken dry (boo!), but it was bound to happen anyway, and if it leaks into the mayo, that just makes the chicken salad unappetizing. The binder helps with the dry chicken, and if you feel like your chicken bites are too dry, cut them into smaller pieces.
Binder: Traditionally, this is mayonnaise, which is one of the things that turns people off to Chicken Salad. The first trick is: don't overdo it. You want to be able to see the chicken, it shouldn't be swimming in it. This is just like any garden salad, the dressing should be pretty skimpy, you don't eat lettuce in a soup of ranch dressing right?
Here's the thing, though. You don't need to use mayo for Binder. I've used mooshed up avocados, homemade aioli, soybean salad dressing, annie's goddess dressing, and lots of other stuff. Not all at once, of course. Anything that's relatively restrained in flavor and has the right kind of consistency will do.
Crunch: A good chicken salad has crunchy bits. This is traditionally the role played by Celery. A note about Celery: those weird strings that make celery hard to eat are pretty much on the outside of the celery stalk. So, use a vegetable peeler and peel your celery. But as you can imagine, I've experimented with lots of other crunchy bits. I like to use sunflower seeds, water chestnuts, chopped onion, celery root (not quite as crunchy, but also not as strongly celery-flavored). You could even use stuff like radishes or carrots.
Flava: Everything else. Once you've gotten a thematic idea for crunch and binder, what else do you need? If you're using avocado, you'll probably want a little bit of tomato and jalapeno and cilantro, for a weird guacamole-chicken-salad. I'm a big fan of a little bit of barbecue sauce, or some paprika and cumin and garlic. Minced garlic and onion help here, even if you don't want to use big chunks of onion for a Crunch.
As you can (hopefully) see: Chicken Salad is really a giant category for all sorts of stuff you can put between two slices of bread. It can be southwestern (chipotle aioli, garlic, corn, celery) asian (a sesame-rice vinaigrette, edamame, and carrots) traditional (mayo, celery) or my favorite: just plain delicious (mayo, celery, sunflower seeds, dried cranberries, paprika, cumin, garlic, onion).
1 comment:
You write very well.
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