What Goes With Chicken Salad? Which Sides To Serve With?

What to Serve With Chicken Salad?

Below you’ll find some good side dishes for chicken salad that are all easy to put together and serve.

1. Soup

The first dish to be introduced on “what to serve with chicken salad for a luncheon” is soup. 

Just imagine, on a cold rainy day, staying in your home and having a hot vegetable soup with juicy flavor, and cheesiness alongside the chicken salad seems just too good to even think about.

There are two main ways to serve salad with vegetable soup. The first method is to use salad as the main dish and the soup on the side.

Or, you can also have chicken salad as an appetizer to slurp the hot soup. Whichever way, chicken salad with hot vegetable soup has always been a great combination.

2. Fruits

Fruit makes a great side dish with your chicken salads for dinner. With the juicy, fresh, and tangy taste, fruit can add more flavor to the unfavorable chicken salad.

Plus, the chicken, the salad, and fruit are all healthy food, which contains many nutritional elements like vitamins and minerals but does not serve too many calories; therefore, this combination is advisable for anyone who wants to take a short detox.

The chicken salad with fruit mixture is easy to prepare: pick whatever fruits you like, wash it carefully, and slice into small pieces.

Then, put fruit, chicken, and salad into a bowl and mix them up. To strengthen the taste, you can pour other seasonings like vinegar, salt, black pepper, etc. based on your favorite.

3. Bread or Sandwiches

Bread is one of the best side dishes for chicken salad. Among many types of bread, what to serve with chicken salad sandwiches? the baguette is recommended as the best bread in that case.

Its rough texture and chewy, moist flavor complement the tender chicken salad well.

On the other hand, you can serve the salads as an appetizer before enjoying the bread as a main dish.

With the meal given, it’d better add more side dishes with bread like jam, sausage, meat, or even pepper to season the plain bread itself. 

There are many other ways to combine chicken salad with bread beside the two methods above. In brief, the bread is chewy and unfavorable, while chicken salad is so fruity and a bit of cheese so that their taste balances each other.

That being said, we highly recommend you try bread with chicken salad for a tasty meal.

4. Potato Chips

Potato chips are another side to go with chicken that not many people can think of. Chicken salad is soft and plain, while potato chips are crispy and salty, so the two mixed will balance each other out.

To add-in, the potato contains many carbohydrates, and chicken has a high-protein portion while vegetables serve vitamins.

The combination of chips and chicken salad is the balance of nutrition, which is great for your diet.

There are no significant differences between the homemade or the store-made chịps.

You can buy potato chips at any fast food store to garnish your chicken salad, or make a bowl of chips yourself to have a customized taste.

5. Stir-Fried Rice

Cooking the leftover rice with chicken salad is also a good choice to clean up your fridge. The rice provides carbohydrates and calories, while the chicken salad is a good source of vitamins.

Plus, the tartness in salad combined with rice’s chewy plain taste, creating a surprisingly tasty flavor for your weekend meal.

To cook the stir-fried rice with chicken salad, you first need about 2 cups of rice (for 3 – 5 people eating), carrot, pepper, parsley, onion, celery, chicken breast lettuce, and most importantly, oil.

This doesn’t take much time to cook. Firstly, wash the rice and cook it in a rice cooker until the “warm” button is switched. Then, take it out and cool down the rice.

After that, put all the cooked rice into a big pan, stir fry it and grate the seasonings as carrots, parsley, celery into the rice. Thoroughly mix the food then for the next 5 minutes.

Finally, serve the rice on a bed of lettuce and top it with chicken. Another way to do this step is to pour the chicken salad mixture over the fried rice. Then, your food is ready to eat.

6. Cheese

Typically, cheese provokes the feeling of abundance and creaminess, making it never considered as an option for what goes well with chicken salad. However, we don’t think so.

Why can’t you still eat clean but also enjoy the creaminess you love at the same time? As long as the portion of cheese is proper, then the chicken salad with cheese is still healthy.

Many types of cheese can go well with chicken salad. People usually put slices of cheese to add just a slightly creamy taste to the dish, but you can pour the whole cheese bowl if you like.

We want to suggest brie cheese, which is made from goat or goat milk and has a salty taste with an earthy aroma.

7. Macaroni

If you find a soft and delicious dish to cook for your children, this meal is definitely what you need. Typically, the salad is quite bland, so children usually don’t like eating it.

However, adding the sweet, buttery macaroni will balance the overall taste so that the food is tastier for children.

The creamy, rich, tender macaroni combined with the juicy, neutral taste of chicken salad makes surprisingly delicious food for your children.

It’s easy to cook the macaroni chicken salad. You must have macaroni, chicken breast fillet, mayonnaise, and other ingredients like onions, carrots, pepper, salt, and cheese. Below is the step-by-step guide for this meal.

First, put macaroni in a saucepan and boil it until completely done. Then, drain it and set it aside.

The second step is to place chicken in a pot and pour water. Bring it to a boil and wait for 10 – 12 minutes or till it is cooked. Divide the meat into small pieces.

Thirdly, in a large bowl, put macaroni, chicken, and salad and toss all the ingredients. Coat the mixture with cheese and seasonings based on your flavor. Then the food is ready to serve.

However, we suggest you cover the bowl with plastic wrap in a fridge for an hour (or more) so that all the food can be blended together.

8. Pickles 

Pickles and chicken salad may be a weird combination at first glance.

However, after giving it a try, you can understand why pickles is the favorite side to serve chicken salad by lots of people: the acidic taste of pickles blended with the mild cheesy of salad creates a balanced, healthy dish that you can eat every day.

What you need first is a fair amount of chicken salad, based on your favor. Prepare a cup of dill pickles, or more if you love eating the sour taste. Finally, we recommend you to have half a cup of sliced green onions for a better aroma.

Now, let’s start making the creamy dressing. Add a bar of softened cream cheese, a tablespoon of mayonnaise, dill pickle juice, salt, pepper, and dried dill in a mixing bowl. Mix all ingredients, and the creamy mixture is ready.

The next step is to stir the dressing until it is smooth and blended. Then, add chicken salad, dill pickles, and onion to the creamy mixture and mix them again.

The chicken salad with pickles is halfway completed in the meantime.

We advise you to store it in a refrigerator for more delicious flavor in the next 5 hours. You can serve the meal with other side dishes for chicken salad croissants or rolls.

9. Coleslaw

The chicken salad with coleslaw is a creamy, cheesy dish containing many calories and fat. Break down the nutrition, a cup of coleslaw chicken salad has about 217 calories, 8g fat, 24g protein, and 8g carbohydrate.

It’s easy to cook this coleslaw combination. First, you need a cup of chicken salad, coleslaw mix, and a hard-boiled diced large egg.

In terms of dressing, whipping, milk, and lemon juice is required. To season the dish, we recommend you use brown sugar, salt, and paprika.

Now, let’s start making coleslaw chicken salad. Take out a small salad bowl and add chicken salad, coleslaw, celery, and egg. In another mixing bowl, mix whipping cream, milk, lemon juice, brown sugar, and celery salt to create the creamy dressing.

Finally, pour the dressing over the chicken salad and toss. You could add paprika if desired, then refrigerate the food until serving.

Basic Chicken Salad Recipe

Chicken salad is the mixture of boiled chicken with vegetables, onions, mayonnaise, and anything else you want to toss in. Here are some ingredients to make the standard chicken salad recipe.

Ingredients

• 1 pound of skin-removed boiling chicken breast
• 2 pound (or higher, based on the favor) of vegetables
• 3/4 cup of chopped onions
• 1 tablespoon of mayonnaise
• Vinegar and pepper to season

Given the ingredients above, we can strongly affirm that the chicken salad is rich in nutritional components. To break down the nutrition, the breast has a high-protein portion but low in fat and calories.

Likewise, vegetables are fruity and vitamins-abundant. Moreover, the seasonings, like pepper and vinegar, contain tons of useful minerals.

Instructions

Here are the guides of a typical chicken salad recipe. 

• Step 1: Fill the saucepan with water. Add in the breast and start boiling. You can pour oil, salt, or any seasonings to boost the aroma.
• Step 2: After 10 minutes, the chicken is completely done. Take it out of the pan, drain in a colander, and wait for the breast to cool down.
• Step 3: Wash the vegetables and chop them up into small pieces
• Step 4: Put chicken and vegetables in a mixing bowl. Then, season them with salt, black pepper, and vinegar as you like. 
• Step 5: Add mayonnaise to the bowl, merge up the ingredients until thoroughly mixed.

The five-step guide is pretty clear and detailed, but you are still confused? Let’s check out this step-by-step tutorial to help you.

Tips

Even though the chicken salad is so easy to prepare, you can still make many mistakes while cooking. Therefore, we want to provide you with some useful cooking tips as below: 

• Be sure to cool down the chicken before adding the dressing. Otherwise, the chicken will warm the dressing, and the dish isn’t tasty as it is when the it is cool.
• Use honey to raise the sweetness
• If desired, put some more fruits like apples and grapes. They work well as seasonings, though.
• In case you can’t endure the parsley’s smell, dill is a great alternative.
• If you love the creamiest chicken salad, choose the full-fat type of mayonnaise.