17 Salads with Chicken for Simple Dinners

By Food & Wine
Updated August 29, 2018
These amazing recipes include chicken salad with cumin-scented carrot raita and spinach salad with smoked chicken, apple, walnuts, and bacon.
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Green Goddess Chicken Salad

Credit: © Petrina Tinslay
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Green Goddess dressing—a mix of mayonnaise, sour cream, herbs, anchovies and lemon—was created at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco in the 1920s, as a tribute to an actor starring in a play called The Green Goddess. The creamy dressing is typically tossed with a green salad, but it's also addictive in Melissa Rubel Jacobson's chicken salad, made with a rotisserie bird.

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Crunchy Vietnamese Chicken Salad

Credit: Lucy Schaeffer
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To save time, use store-bought rotisserie chicken and skip the scallion oil; the salad already gets plenty of flavor from the spicy, vinegary dressing and abundance of fresh herbs.

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Almond-Poached Chicken Salad

Credit: Con Poulos
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In a twist on an ordinary green salad with chicken, Food & Wine’s Laura Rege poaches chicken breasts in almond milk before cooling, shredding and mixing with crunchy and colorful purple cauliflower, radishes and fresh herbs.

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Chicken Salad with Walnuts and Roquefort Dressing

Credit: David De Vleeschauwer
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The salty Roquefort cries out for a sweet wine to provide contrast—but Sauternes, Roquefort's classic cheese-course partner, is too sweet. Try instead a drier and much less expensive Côteaux du Layon from the Loire Valley.

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Chicken Salad with Zucchini, Lemon and Pine Nuts

Credit: Tina Rupp
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Armand Arnal uses ingredients from his restaurant's enormous organic garden to create seasonal Provençal dishes like this salad of chicken tossed with pine nuts and lemon-marinated zucchini.

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Chicken Caprese Salad

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Bocconcini (mini mozzarella balls) are often sold floating in herbed olive oil. That tasty oil is essential to this three-ingredient recipe because it adds so much flavor to both the chicken marinade and the dressing.

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Asian Chicken Salad with Wasabi Dressing

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This delectable poached-chicken salad, packed with Asian pear, cucumber and bean sprouts, offers a double hit of wasabi. First, F&W's Melissa Rubel whisks wasabi powder into the dressing—a blend of mayonnaise, rice vinegar and sesame oil—then she garnishes the salad with crunchy wasabi peas.

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Grilled Chinese Chicken Salad

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Store-bought shredded coleslaw mix makes this salad incredibly easy to make.

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Chicken Salad with Cucumber, Red Pepper, and Honey-Mustard Dressing

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Starting with cooked chicken—leftovers, perhaps, or a store-bought rotisserie chicken—keeps the preparation time short. If you want just chicken salad with no greens, skip the lettuce; double the chicken, cucumber, bell pepper, onion, and tarragon; and toss them with the dressing.

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Spinach Salad with Smoked Chicken, Apple, Walnuts, and Bacon

Credit: David Malosh
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Celebrate autumn's apple season with this delicious and satisfying salad. We call for the thick-sliced smoked chicken now available in the meat department of supermarkets. Of course, you can always use smoked turkey from the deli counter instead. If you like a more pronounced sweet-and-sour flavor, use another teaspoon of vinegar.

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Waldorf Chicken Salad

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Mark Sullivan brines poultry before roasting it, then tosses it with little gem lettuce, pickled grapes and candied walnuts. The total number of ingredients: 28. Streamline the ingredient list to lower the cost: This recipe calls for about half the ingredients.

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Chicken Salad with Cumin-Scented Carrot Raita

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A supermarket rotisserie bird right off the spit is wonderful in this Middle Eastern-inspired warm chicken dish. It's a delicious and healthy alternative to a typical mayonnaise-based chicken salad, especially in a sandwich.

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Chicken Salad with Piquillo Dressing

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Seamus Mullen slowly poaches chicken in a broth made with chicken stock, white wine and vegetables. He tosses the meat with salad greens, fingerling potatoes, carrot ribbons and Spanish Arbequina olives, which can be hard to find.

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Coronation Chicken Salad with Mangoes and Almonds

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This sweet-tangy curried chicken salad, tossed with mango and crunchy toasted almonds, was invented to honor the crowning of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, and served at her coronation luncheon. While chef Tom Aikens follows the original recipe closely, he brightens the dressing with minced hot chiles and chunks of sweet mango.

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Winter Chicken Salad with Citrus and Celery

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Mindy Fox's riff on Chinese chicken salad calls for blood orange in place of mandarin orange.

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Grilled-Chicken-and-Asparagus Salad with Parsley Pesto

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Parsley, garlic, lemon juice, and oil—that's all it takes to make an outstanding dressing. The secret is in using a lot of parsley. You'll be surprised how flavorful it is.

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Kale Salad with Chicken

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"Kale salads are great with a dressing that relies on cured fish, like anchovies or the salted oysters I make, which I call 'oy-chovies,'" says chef Spike Gjerde.

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