Quick and Easy Chicken Waldorf Salad

February 1, 2013

This Chicken Waldorf Salad recipe from Chef Marco Pierre White is simple and delicious and only takes 5 minutes to make. All you need is chicken, celery, walnuts, apples, lemon juice and mayo! And, it's also a great way to use up leftover chicken. Watch below on how to make this easy chicken salad recipe.

Waldorf salad with roast chicken, very simple and delicious.  The great thing is it takes five minutes to make.  You don’t see it very often now but when I was a boy and I started in the trade, it was on all the menus.  But with roast chicken, it’s delicious, it’s a nice alternative, it’s very simple: celery, walnuts and apples.  Today I’m using Hellmann’s mayonnaise but I’m going to be honest, I never make mayonnaise at home but then I add Knorr Touch of Taste which gives it that nice roast chicken flavor, with the apples and the celery and the walnuts and the roast chicken, delicious.  So, you take your celery and you can see, see what I’m doing, I’m just cutting into matchsticks, not necessary, you can just chop it up.  I’m just one of those people who likes to make work for myself.  As you can see I just run my knife through the celery and cut into thin matchsticks.  Again, don’t allow a recipe to dictate.  Cut two sticks of celery into matchsticks.  As you can see, it’s not perfect but it’s sort of quite elegant.  And now I’m going to take two apples.  So what we do with the apples, again, turn them into matchsticks again.  The apples I’m using are Granny Smiths; they’re my preferred apple for Waldorf.  Again, it doesn’t have to be perfect.

When you’re chopping your celery and your apples, you don’t have to turn them into matchsticks like I do.  I’m quite confident with a knife so it’s easy for me.  But if your knife skills aren’t that great, just chop.  So there I have it, my matchsticks of celery and Granny Smiths apple, then we take the leaves of the celery, rather than waste them, just chop them and use them like a herb in the salad.  Just mix it in.  A tiny little bit of lemon juice and just mix it in to stop the oxidization.

Now, here’s our mayonnaise and a tiny little bit of Knorr Touch of Taste which just gives it that roast flavor.  And again treat it like a dressing rather than [0:02:17.9] quite light, so just not too much.  Just like dressing a salad.  Sometimes you get coleslaw which is so thick or Waldorf which is so thick, you’ve got to retain that freshness so just with your spoon without breaking your apples and your celery, a few little walnuts on the bottom rather than mix them inside.  Again, I like to build my layers of flavor and texture.  So, there’s our salad, you can see it’s lightly dressed.  Then we take our chicken.

As you can see I’ve removed the breast from the chicken.  Now, many ways of carving a chicken.  Let’s go with the grain and make it very fine.  And if you don’t want to take your chicken breasts off the bone like myself, just take it off in chunks, you know, cut the legs in half, serve whole breasts, your choice, make life easy, just enjoy it, it won’t taste any different.  Arrange your chicken over the salad.  And the salad and the chicken work fantastically together well.  And take some walnuts, just sprinkle the walnuts over the top and then just take some herb.  I’m using parsley.  And there we have it, our Waldorf salad with roast chicken.

Waldorf salad, without question is one of the great salads.  It works well with many things.  So if you always roast a whole chicken like I have, and serve it with a salad, then it’s a great semi supper dish.  If you’ve got some roast pork left from lunch, with Waldorf salad.  If you’ve got some roast chicken, some roast turkey, it works deliciously well.  But having said all that, it’s just nice on its own.

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