Video – Chicken Salad

How to make Chicken Salad | Martha Stewart

Instructions:

1. Watch video.
2. Then read text below it.
3. Listen and read at the same time. Repeat.
4. Watch video again without text.

Chicken salad is delicious all times of the year, and it’s very easy to make a very simple version. All you need is just the right amount of mayonnaise, a good strong fresh herb, and a perfectly cooked chicken breast. And the chicken breast must be baked, not poached. Today we’re making it with three organic chicken breasts, a little bit more than a pound each. We want to season our chicken breasts, and the bone is in, okay? Very important. And the skin is on. We have our oven preheated to 325ᵒ. Roast for approximately an hour and 15 minutes.

Now drizzle these with a little olive oil or canola oil, about a half a teaspoon. There.

Now put these in the oven. Both cooking the chicken on the bones and roasting rather than poaching adds a deeper, and much richer flavor to the chicken.

Once they come out of the oven they have to cool for about twenty minutes.  So we’ve already roasted these breasts, and we will proceed. You’ll have to remove all the meat from the bones. 

So, once you’ve gotten all the meat off the bones, just look over the meat. Make sure you don’t have any little pieces of broken bone and shave off any fatty parts. And then cut this up into nice size cubes.

It’s great to cook the chicken the day before you’re having a lunch party.  Chicken salad is great not only in sandwiches, but it’s also great served on a bed of lettuce.  It’s great served in a great big ripe garden tomato.

And now you can add all your lovely herbs. And it’s nice to add the leaves of the tarragon. Tarragon has a wonderful almost licorice flavor. So add approximately two tablespoons of tarragon that’s been chopped, and two thirds of a cup of your favorite mayonnaise. Because what you really want when you’re making chicken salad is those big, beautiful chunks of chicken and that fresh, fresh taste. 

And now, serve with whole wheat bread, bibb lettuce and cucumbers.  We have a wonderful seven grain bread here. We were greatly inspired by Eli Zabar. And Eli makes an extraordinary chicken salad sandwich.

And you can slice the bread. Notice I’m slicing it in an unconventional way. This way you can make a sandwich like this with beautiful bibb lettuce. And because we’ve used quite a bit of mayonnaise in the salad, we don’t need to add any more to the bread.

And put it on like this. Be generous. Nothing’s worse than a skimpy sandwich. But also, nothing’s worse than a sandwich that’s just so full that it falls all over you when you eat it. So there’s that happy medium. And make sure that the filling always goes to the outside of the bread. And now, top it with your other piece of bread.

And then the way Eli does it, stack these like this and serve it on a plate with maybe some sliced cucumbers around the outside. And you have a chicken salad sandwich.