3 EASY Deli-Style Chicken Salads To Make Now

Today, we're gonna make three delicious and different chicken salad recipes. Let's make them right now. All right, I always like to go over all the ingredients, but because we're doing three chicken salad recipes, let's go over the ingredients for one at a time, except for the chicken. Each recipe is going to use one and a half pounds of chicken, roughly, that's about three breasts worth. I have nine chicken breasts here, or roughly four to four and a half pounds of chicken. We're gonna poach them. We're gonna do it in a second. I'm gonna show you how to do it. We're gonna poach them, actually, in water and chicken base mixture. So if you look at the recipe for any of these individual chicken salads, it will say, just to fill the water up in the pot high enough that the three chicken breasts are going to be submerged, and you use two tablespoons of chicken base. Since I'm doing nine here, I just increased it a little bit to three tablespoons. That chicken base is simply gonna infuse the chicken a little bit with some more chickeny flavor, just a little bit of salt. You can get more crazy here, and you can put a whole bunch of seasonings in your poaching mixture, or you can just go super simple and just use straight water, okay? The choice is yours. After the chicken comes out, we'll break it up, and then we're gonna season it with a quarter teaspoon granulated garlic, quarter teaspoon white pepper, and a half a teaspoon of just salt, okay? Just just fine sea salt, not a coarse salt. And then after that, after it seasons, after it sits and absorbs it, then we'll simply just make our honey mustard chicken salad with three quarter cup of sliced almonds, a quarter cup of green onion that I just sliced like so, two tablespoons of honey, two tablespoons of Dijon mustard, one tablespoon of white vinegar, and then mayo, because you can't just mix honey and mustard together to make honey mustard. You have to always mix mayo into it. That's really, like, it would just be too potent that way. We'll mix in a little bit, probably about a half a cup worth. We'll go over all the exact measurements when we're making it. I have Hellmann's, which, you know, I had Hellmann's in the New York deli chicken salad. I think I had it in the New York egg salad, the New York deli tuna, and so many comments were always like, oh, Hellmann's is crap. You got to use Duke's. And, you know, I went out and bought Duke's after that, and, you know, to my taste buds, they taste exactly the same. So either one is fine. I would probably just skip the Miracle Whip, okay? Because that is not a substitute for mayo. But you can use this, I mean, you can use Blue Plate, I think is like the, right? Blue Plate's the Louisiana one tower, I think. No, so I just told you, I just taught you something. I think it is. But yeah, each region of the country has their mayo. On the West Coast, Hellmann's is best foods. Okay, it's the same stuff. Let's poach some chicken. If you're going to do all three salads, which you're probably not going to do, you're probably watching this video for, and you're going to decide which one you're going to make. But either way, you want to have enough water in your pot when you poach it so that it covers the chicken. I probably need an even bigger pot than this, but I think it'll work. And I'll show you how do you poach chicken that makes it really tender. You just follow exactly what I'm going to do here. Water, a lot of water, and I'm putting the chicken base in there. Just get it all distributed so it just will liquefy. And it normally does it fairly quickly if you have boiling water. I know this is a very exciting video today, Tara. It is actually, because I love chicken salad. And you love to poach chicken too, right? I do, it's good just plain. Yep, yeah, it's good. You know, we could actually, we could have done a video where we showed everything you can make with poached chicken and you can make a lot of stuff with poached chicken. Yeah, I feel like you could do, we did the rotisserie chicken video. I feel like everything that we did in that video with the rotisserie chicken, you could also do with the poached chicken. We did a 15 minute rotisserie chicken meal video, three 15 minute rotisserie chicken meals. Watch that one if you haven't seen it. Okay, so it's boiling now. So I'm going to put all my chicken in here. Now again, it says, make sure like after your chicken's in that it overfills by three inches, the water. I'm going to be like high here. I kind of figured that was going to happen. So I put it about halfway. We're testing the limit of this pot, but that's going to be good. I got enough submersion there. So cover the pot again. Once it starts boiling, that I'll show you the secret. So you bring it up to a boil. It is boiling now, okay? Leave the lid on, turn the heat off. And then I'm just going to bring my pot off the heat, off the burner itself, okay? Right there, 20 minutes at least, but you can let it go up to an hour. Just keep that lid on. It's hot enough in here that it's going to bring this chicken up till it's cooked, till the 160 to 165 level, and it'll be moist and tender. But again, wait at least 20 minutes. If you want to be safe, maybe just wait till 30 before you check one. I checked at 20 and they were already good. I think we're at like 27 minutes now. It's going to be fine even if you leave them in there. Just want to make that clear to you. All right, so let's take this off. You can use an instant read thermometer to check one if you're worried. So we'll just do that now quick. Pull one out. These things are awesome. Now, inexpensive too. It's like $10 for one of these, $12. You just open it, gives you the temperature, and we'll just go into the middle part of it. And you can see right there, it's like 168, 169, it's like 172. Don't worry, it's still going to be juicy, tender, everything, if you poached it correctly, okay? So these are done. And that'll give you, now you don't have to worry about anything. For simplicity and so you don't get confused, I'm going to do one recipe at a time, but I could just take them all, break everything down and put all my seasoning on. The seasoning is a little bit different for each one. That's why I don't want to get you confused, and I will do it one at a time. So I'm going to take three of them. Actually, let me get a bigger one over here because the honey mustard chicken salad has the least amount of ingredients and the least amount of stuff in it, like texture. So it's not as bulky. Okay, so here's our chicken. Okay, see that? Beautifully poached, tender, okay? Cooked. And for now, I'm just going to chop it up like this, but, and this is all a matter of preference, I like to sometimes shred the chicken too. Like sometimes I'll do half and half. But for now, just to get the seasoning on, I'm just going to chop. All right, so let's spread this chicken out. When it's hot, it works a little bit better. So like when you get the seasoning on. Look, if you're watching this here, you're like, Jim, you did everything in the New York deli chicken salad exactly this way. That's right, I did do it this way because it's the best way to do it. And this is the only one that doesn't have sugar right now because we're using the honey. We don't want to make it too sweet, but the other ones have the sugar in it and everything absorbs into the chicken. All right, so this is a quarter teaspoon granulated garlic, quarter teaspoon white pepper, half a teaspoon of salt. You put gloves on or if your hands are clean, just do it yourself. Just mix it all up, get all that seasoning in there. And I like to let it sit until it gets cool enough to mix with our salad ingredients. It'll cool down relatively quickly. Okay, so let's make the honey mustard very simply. Two tablespoons of honey. Again, that's why we put no sugar in on the chicken initially. Almost all delis, they use sugar in pretty much every salad behind the counter. And a lot of people don't like that they do that, but it's all like the balancing, whether you're talking mac salad, potato, coleslaw, chicken, they don't do it, not in tuna. For the delis that make a honey mustard chicken salad, do you think they're using sugar in that or are they actually using honey? Just honey. And I think the delis I worked at, they used like a pre-made honey mustard, just mixed it in. They're not like, I'm making it from scratch. I mean, honey mustard is just honey, honey, mustard, and mayo. I'm putting in one tablespoon of white vinegar. Okay, and I'm gonna put in a half a cup of mayonnaise. Okay, Hellman's mayonnaise, okay, roughly a half a cup. Just like that much to start. I always recommend for any of these salads, you've gotta put them in the fridge overnight, okay? They're gonna be a million times better. And what happens when they're in the fridge, they go from like creamy and like perfect looking to drying out a little bit. So then you mix in more mayo the next day, if you need to. So that's our honey mustard mixture. We can get a whisk to break that up better. So now the remaining ingredients, three quarter cup of almonds, green onion. Don't know if we need all that, put that much for now. So listen, chicken, a lot of people like big chunks in their chicken salad. I don't, I like it more like more on the shredded side. So what you can do is you can put on some gloves, okay? Some bro gloves, which is easy, or you can just get your knife and really chop it up a lot. Okay, I'm just gonna shred like that. Now you can put it all in there and do it too, but then you're gonna break up your almonds a ton, which isn't a big deal. Tara, what's your feeling on this? Chunks or more shredding? I like more shredded. Yeah. I don't like shredded, like the shredded chicken in the can. Yeah, we didn't even talk about the can. I mean, I don't really like that. I'm not a fan. Yeah. I do prefer like the poached chicken to be shredded in the chicken salad. How many delis do you think you're using not canned chicken these days? I would say a lot. Probably. A lot of delis these days are actually getting all these salads from like Restaurant Depot and stuff and like Cisco, like, you know, food distributors, whatever. And just everything, everything's kind of like being made ahead of time. A lot of it's not that good. A lot of restaurants are doing that too. And then telling you they're making everything at the restaurant. Yeah, I think they do that with a lot of their desserts. A lot of restaurants that will serve like tiramisu, they will get that from Restaurant Depot. But you can get everything from Restaurant Depot. You can get everything. That's a fair distribution of like chopped to shredded. Okay, and I'm just gonna go in there with my hands. And the reason I used a smaller bowl here is because this one doesn't have a lot in it. That is honey mustard chicken salad. We're going to taste this one and then we're gonna put it in the fridge. What's your preferred way to eat a honey mustard chicken salad? Because I feel like different chicken salads are good for different things. I think a honey mustard chicken salad is good on a roll with some nice lettuce, like some crunchy lettuce. Croissant. Croissant is delicious too. I actually, the picture, I did it with a croissant. Yeah, like the butter and the croissant I think plays really well with the flavors in honey mustard chicken. Okay, moving along. Waldorf chicken salad. This originates from the Waldorf salad. I thought it was originally a Waldorf chicken salad. That's not the case. It's a Waldorf salad, which had no chicken in it. So later, whenever somebody said, I'll mix chicken in it, now I have a Waldorf chicken salad. So there's no really official recipe for this. Some will have grapes and apple. Some will just have one. Okay, I think both is nice. So I'm gonna, the recipe says a half a cup of sliced grapes, halved grapes. I have like more than a cup here. I like it. My only recommendation is with grapes and I just sliced these off camera. Make sure that you get the freshest grapes you can. I mean, grapes are just, sometimes you go to store, you know, you buy a bag of grapes and they're just all mushy. Don't use them then if that's the case. Just use more apple, okay? You know, you don't wanna mix something that's not so good in your chicken salad. It'll just make it really bad right away. Okay, so I do have one apple and I am going to wait till right now to slice it because if I'd sliced it earlier, it would be all brown when I'm showing it to you. I have one cup of diced celery. I'm just saying, I'm just giving you the cup measurements here, okay? It's roughly two ribs, two to three ribs. A quarter cup of just diced red onion. Probably use a little bit more if you like. Three quarter cup of walnuts that I just ran my knife through, okay? Just very, you know, very roughly. And then we have one tablespoon of lemon juice that's going to be mixed in with our mayo. And then for the mayo, we're gonna use about three quarter cup. Give or take. The next day, again, you're probably gonna have to remix with a little bit more. For the chicken, chicken is a little different this time and we'll do it right now. We have the same as before with the quarter teaspoon of white pepper, the quarter teaspoon granulated garlic, and a half teaspoon of fine sea salt. But we also have one and a half teaspoons of granulated sugar, okay? So I'm just gonna get this all on here. You know, and if you do this right when it comes out of the poaching liquid, it'll be warmer and it'll be easier to absorb it. Okay, and just mix that up. Okay, and for this one, put that one tablespoon of lemon juice right in there. We're gonna do about three quarter cup of mayo. It doesn't have to be exact. You're gonna be mixing. If you follow what I'm saying and you should, especially if you're here from those other deli salads, you know how important it is to go in the fridge overnight. Don't mess with that. If you don't do it, it's not gonna be anywhere near as good. But when you do that, you're always gonna have to do a remix the next day. So that's mixed together. Here's that chicken. Okay, I chopped a little bit of it and then the other stuff I left larger. For this one, I think you could go maybe a little bit more chunks. I actually agree. I like this one chunkier. Yeah, a little bit chunkier. I feel like this one, if I was gonna have the Waldorf chicken salad, I'd want it on top of lettuce instead of on a sandwich. I agree with that. I wouldn't put this one on a sandwich. Here is that cup of diced celery, quarter cup of diced red onion, three quarter cup of roughly chopped walnuts. Here's the apple that I just cubed off camera, like diced, like fairly, like I want everything to be relatively the same. Okay, bite size pieces. And then there are our grapes. Do that much for now. So you can try to mix it with a spoon, but it's always easier to go in there with gloves and try it with a spoon here. Now also, if you wanna make this one a little healthier, you can do Greek yogurt, okay? Instead of the mayo or a mixture of the two. Can even get a little sour cream in there. All those white, thick things that you keep in your fridge, you can kind of like fool around with it. And you're gonna see on the next one what we do is we're not using mayo on the next one. This looks great. We can add in the rest of those grapes. I think when you serve this, it's not a bad idea to have more grapes on the side and maybe even some apples to sprinkle on top so people like know what they're getting. Yep, that's a chicken piece, apple. That is good. And that's my least favorite one out of the three of these. The one coming up next is my favorite one. Okay, so yeah, my favorite one here, this is, and this is an invention by me. It does not exist anywhere on the planet. It is the best original chicken salad recipe you will ever have. Okay, we're doing, again, with the same chicken I have over here. And this one now has same ingredients, that quarter teaspoon white pepper, quarter teaspoon granulated garlic, half teaspoon salt, and it has one tablespoon of sugar, plus more to taste if you need it. We have a half a cup of diced red onion. I have two tablespoons of white vinegar. I have a bunch of dill, okay, about that much. Three tablespoons, quarter cup, whatever. It's really nice with a lot of dill. And then we have one cucumber that we're gonna seed and chop, okay, and then one and a half cups of Greek yogurt. So essentially we're making a creamy chicken cucumber salad or a creamy cucumber chicken salad, one or the other. But this has like all the taste of like tzatziki sauce with chicken. It's great on sandwiches, but it's also great by itself. All right, so the first thing we're going to do is the same thing we've done for three in a row. Jim, a lot of people ask about sugar and oftentimes they'll say they're diabetic. You don't have to use all the sugar in here if you don't want to. No, they can start with none, start with none. Or honey is supposedly better glycemic index, right, compared to sugar? I think, I mean, I believe so, but we don't give nutrition advice here. We're not nutritionists. All I can make a claim about is what is delicious, okay? And that's my opinion too, but seriously, that's it. All right, so I'm just going to chop up a little bit with my hands, just a little bit, half and then the other half is bigger pieces. Is that okay, Tara? Yeah. Okay. Cucumbers, English cucumbers are great. I love them. They always come sold normally in the store in one wrapped in plastic. This one's all right. It's probably seen better days, but it will normally start getting softer and going bad on the end. So I'll just cut off the end there. And then we have this piece like so. So this one's like kind of curved a lot. So just be careful when you're doing it, but we're going to go down the middle, okay? Just take your knife, point like this and just go through. So now these seeds here are great when, you know, you can eat them, of course, and everything, you make a salad, you just chop up your cucumber. But for this, it's going to go in. It's just going to make everything really wet. We don't want it. I mean, and honestly, when you make a tzatziki sauce, you'd be doing the same process. You'd probably be salting the cucumber and all that and drawing all the moisture out. But I just take a spoon like so and I just remove all the seeds. Okay, just go like that, do the whole thing. Okay, and then same thing, I'm going to do, you can do half moons if your cucumber is very small, but I'm going to do quarter moons. Okay, so just like that. And then about a quarter inch apart or six millimeters. That's like a good bite size piece in relation to everything else, like the chicken that's in there. Okay, and then this one, you can just throw everything in. You don't even need to mix a sauce or anything. All the chicken, cucumber. Okay, that's one English cucumber that was seeded. Okay, and cut into quarter moons. This is a half a cup of diced red onion, about a quarter cup of fresh dill, which I love. It just makes it, it just makes this dish. Okay, that's that two tablespoons of white vinegar. And then here is all of that yogurt, which is about one and a half cups or roughly 360 grams. We used 5% Greek yogurt for this, but you could use zero or you could use full fat, right? Yeah. It will, the consistency will change a little bit. Yeah, I mean, I'm always, I always love the full fat Greek yogurt, but the stores, for the most part, they've all kind of switched to not even selling the full fat ones. It's like- They still have it, but I think the 5% is the one that I can find most easily. Yeah. So don't worry if this is a little dry right now. This is going to get wetter from that cucumber, even though we removed the seeds, you'll see. And yogurt in general, like just, you know, just we'll release water, but just make sure it's all coated. Again, break out the gloves way easier than doing this. And for this one, I'm trying to give like serving suggestions for each one. This one is good by itself, but it's also really good in like a warm pita. Oh yeah. And also on top of a salad. Better than, I think, making like a sandwich, like with bread. Though you can make a sandwich with all three of these. Yeah, of course. Yeah. All right, so I'm just going to give this one a little taste. Sounds just delicious. This is one probably that you're not going to leave in a fridge for three days. Cucumbers are going to get a little soggy, I think. I mean, this is great right now. This is probably the one I would go for almost immediately. All right, I'm going to put plastic on it. We're going to get everything set up. We're going to have the taste tester. The official taste tester, I think, is coming today. We're going to see what he thinks of these chicken salads. James, you just ate a bunch of meatballs. Now you have to eat a bunch of chicken salad. What's in this? This is called Waldorf chicken salad. It's with apples and grapes. It's actually pretty good. Good. You let us know which is like your, like which one you like the most. It's like a different flavor. Yeah. And this is honey mustard. Honey mustard chicken salad. It's so, I used almonds. Some places will use pecans or walnuts. I change it up with green onions. Most places don't. A lot of delis here on Long Island will make something like this in the city too. Creamy cucumber chicken dill salad. And just so you know, this one has mayo. This has mayo and that has yogurt. Okay, so James, what do you think? I know how I'm going to rank it, definitely. I think this one is the number one. It just tastes like the most like actual chicken salad. And like, I actually like the grapes in it. Like, I don't know if it needs the apples really. Like the grapes are a good addition. They actually taste pretty good. This is a number two. I actually like the yogurt. It's like completely different from a chicken salad. But like, I actually like it. The cucumbers are really good. It's different, but it's good. I'm not a big fan of this. It doesn't even taste like honey mustard to me really. And like, I'm just like. You got not enough honey, not enough mustard or what? I just don't get enough of anything. I'm just like, I feel like the flavor is just like not strong enough in this. Like, I don't usually dislike. But you do dislike this one? It's not that I dislike it. It's just like, I wouldn't eat it. I wouldn't eat it again. Okay. I'm going to give this like a nine out of 10. I'm going to give this one an eight out of 10. I'm going to give this one a five out of 10. A five, wow, nice. All right, that's the lowest rating ever. And I like it. I want it. It's like a seven out of 10. That's like, that's like, oh yeah, I would get it. Like seven and up is like, yeah, I would definitely eat it again. And like six is like, six is like, I would eat it if it was in front of me. But like, I wouldn't get it again. And this is just like. Take it away from me. Like, no, actually no. I would eat it if it was the only thing in front of me. Like if it was like, if you guys made it for dinner and like, then I would eat it. But like, I wouldn't like refuse. But I just wouldn't. I've never craved this in my life. Do you think it would be better, like you're tasting each of them out of the deli container, right? Do you think adding any of them to bread or a pita or a croissant or something like that would be, would make any of them better? This would be good on bread. I think this would almost be good as a dip. Yeah, I think that'd be a good dip. I agree. I don't know. It kind of tastes like, like the dill makes it taste almost like a dip. Tastes like the tzatziki sauce. Yeah. Yeah, it tastes like the tzatziki sauce. Well, James, we appreciate your ratings. I like the five. Feel free to give me a four on the next one that you come on. Everybody's happy. Maybe I will. Well, maybe, maybe he will. Yeah, and you'll have to stay, come back for the next review. You haven't been on a lot of videos lately. So this, I don't know when this is gonna go up, but some people are like, where's James? What happened to James? Are you gonna start doing more reviews again? Yeah. All right. Thanks, James. You're welcome. We will see you next time.