Classic Chicken Salad Recipe: Creamy and Delicious!

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✍️ In the video, I explain why each ingredient works. I hope you’ll watch me make it. I make it just like Granny. She used her hands to shred the chicken and I do too. It really does make it better.

I use chicken breasts. I simmer the breasts with carrots, celery, onions, and garlic. By simmering it, you will get truly tender shredded chicken, and simmering them in the aromatics give it the extreme flavor. These two steps are imperative for great chicken salad.

I use Dukes mayonnaise, but Hellman’s is also a good choice. Dill pickles as opposed to sweet pickles makes this a traditional and classic chicken salad and adds just enough sour notes that brings out the flavor of the chicken perfectly. I add just as much celery as I do pickles and that gives extra crunch as well as the perfect flavor to round out the dish.

This is one of the tried and true recipes that my Granny taught me to make. It’s perfect as it is and cannot be improved upon. I’ve made changes through the years to no avail. It truly is the most perfected recipe for chicken salad. I keep this chicken salad on hand pretty much all the time. I find if I snack on the chicken salad, I don’t go for the potato chips calling my name.

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Get recipe: https://stacylynharris.com/best-chicken-salad-recipe/

00:00 – Intro
00:48 – Chicken simmer
02:30 – Chicken prep
03:41 – Mixture & ingredients
07:05 – Taste test

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today I am making oldfashioned chicken [Music] salad this is one of my family’s favorites you have this everywhere you go in the South and I didn’t know this but I looked up when this is served mostly and surprisingly it was the 4th of July I couldn’t believe it cuz we do barbecue most of the time but yeah yes this is one of those things maybe it’s brought to a potluck it’s always brought to a potluck so maybe at the lake it’s just something people can make and take and put in their cooler I don’t know but we are going to make it today and it’s oldfashioned this is my grandmother’s recipe and it is spectacular okay so a lot of people roast their chicken but I like to simmer my chicken in spices or in the aromatics rather um I have celery a celery root onion um I’ve got garlic cloves four garlic cloves a lemon haved and squeezed um and a bay leaf some thyme a bunch of parsley salt and pepper um and so it’s pretty much just what you would do when you are boiling chicken so um I are making stock and I’m going to keep the stock don’t worry about that I will be definitely keeping it but the neat thing about this is you can just roughly chop everything throw it in the pot turn it on Bring it to a boil and then turn it down to a simmer and let it go until everything’s done I cut my meat which their chicken breasts and six chicken breasts and I just cut it into strips but you don’t even have to do that so I’m just getting my chicken and I’m putting it right into um a bowl and I am going to be making the simp simple very very simple um mixture that the chicken is going to be mixed up in and it’s very very simple a lot of people like in Rhode Island um or you know that was the first place anyway that uh people began to put grapes and pecans and different things into their chicken salad um and I have done that and I do love that but this is the old fashion kind that we all know and we all love so I’m just going to break this up real quick and then I’m going to tell you what all goes into the mixture my grandmother always did this and so I always do it you can forego this part if you want to but I don’t really like any big huge chunks in my chicken salad and one lady I know actually um does a food processor and gets hers like totally tiny and I you know I do like a little texture but I like it hand done so I break it up a little bit more to make sure it’s all good and broken and this is super moist because I simmered it the flavor is in in the chicken because we we simmered it on such low heat it is in the chicken a lot of people will roast theirs you get a lot of good flavor with roasting your chicken salad to me that particular chicken salad I like to cut up into just um smaller bites but not shred and you can shred it it’s not nothing wrong with it but I think it’s really good in Little Bites like that so I have this nice and shredded like I want to it’s it’s gotten cooler so it’s not going to you know make the mayonnaise super hot or anything when I put that in into the mixture okay I’m going to wash my hands all right and now comes the fun part the mixture okay I’ve got cry here and I’m just cutting it into long long strips okay and I’m going to cut it into small little pieces in just a minute I don’t put onion in this because I I simmered it in some of the onion and I don’t put um I don’t you know I don’t need to put a whole lot in here at all because it’s got so much flavor just on its own so I will be putting the mayonnaise in and that gives it loads of flavor I have a homemade mayonnaise recipe that you could use and that’s the way that they used to do it back in the 1800s when this recipe came about um and you can always do that it’s not very hard to do do it’s just olive oil lemon juice um you could put Garlic in it that kind of makes it into an aoli or whatever but it’s really it’s really pretty simple so I’m just going to cut this up into small pieces and it’s just very finely diced if you’re going to do onion I recommend to make sure that it’s finally diced too because you just don’t want a lot of onion going into your mouth um and and just getting one big huge bite of onion okay all right I’ve already added the salt and pepper to the um simmer so I’m not sure that it needs a whole lot I’m going to taste the chicken and this is another thing you just really need to taste your food as you go but I’m going to taste the chicken and see if I feel like the chicken itself has enough salt and pepper okay it’s probably going to be able to use a little bit more I’m not going to put it in until the very end though okay so now I’ve got about five stalks or so of celery but it’s about 1 and 1/2 cups so it’s six chicken breast 1 and 1/2 cups of celery two cups of mayonnaise now I like Dukes they didn’t have it at the store the other day so I got helmond I like helmond as well but you need to use a really good mayonnaise or do it homemade 3/4 cups of dill pickles okay Dill is important it’s okay if a little juice is in there um it’ll just give a little bit more flavor and moisture to the chicken salad okay so I’m just going to mix this all together I can already tell it needs a little pepper so I’m going to go ahead and add my pepper so this is about half a teaspoon okay I’m going to just mix this together and we’re going to go from here the very first cookbook that chicken salad is known to be in was the Carolina housewife and it was in the 1800s and we’re still writing recipes today for chicken salad so I’ve got it in my 2000’s cookbook so we’re talking a very very long time so here it is this is it now I’m going to give a little taste to this and see if it needs any salt M I think it’s really pretty perfect I don’t think it needs any salt at all um I’m going to put it on a little piece of toast right here and see how this stands up and you know the simmering is the most important part of this recipe if you keep the heat really low and you simmer your chicken it’s going to be nice and it’s going to soak up the flavor it’s going to be tender easy to shred it’s going to be delicious and it’s just going to make your chicken salad all right I’m going to give a big bite to this and see if this is good M mhm I could Feast on that and I may just have it this Fourth of July don’t forget to subscribe to my channel and like this post it really does a lot of help thanks [Music] [Music]