Chicken Salad with White Beans

for 6-19-97

Chicken Salads of Summer

At one time, recipes for tuna fish salad, chicken salad, turkey salad, shrimp salad and so on, were fungible. The ingredients and procedures for making these dishes were much the same: mix canned tuna, cooked chopped chicken -- fill in the blank -- with chopped celery, bind it with mayonnaise and there you have it.

Those days are gone forever. Not that there's anything wrong with these old-fashioned salads. It's simply that we have expanded our culinary horizons in recent years. Home cooks today know that if they want to prepare salad with chicken or any other ingredient, there are lots of choices; a multitude of tastes to make a summer of interesting dinners.

Chicken salad is the most versatile of all. The meat is mild and lends itself to more variation than the others.

The tastiest chicken salad begins with a bird specially prepared to highlight the meat's delicate flavor and to preserve succulence. Poached whole chicken is the ideal ingredient for this dish. The chicken cooks slowly in the simmering, seasoned liquid, so the meat has time to absorb flavor and moisture. There's a bonus too -- chicken stock or soup.

Boneless and skinless chicken breasts or thighs are good choices too. It takes little time to cook them, a boon if you're busy, and you have your pick of white or dark meat. It's easy to cook boneless, skinless portions in a steamer, or, you can poach them, but there's no gift of stock or soup. They lack the flavor that a whole bird, with its skin and bones, can give to liquid and they cook too quickly to be useful for soup.

There's nothing wrong with preparing chicken salad using the meat left over from a large roasted bird or any other type of cooked chicken. If the bird was seasoned boldly to begin with -- tandoori chicken or barbecued chicken, for example -- the meat may have a strong flavor. That simply means you must think more about the additions to and seasonings in the salad. It limits you only slightly.

There's an almost endless array of ingredients and seasonings for chicken salad. The old standbys (celery, hard cooked egg, apples, red onion, green peppers and so on) always work, but you can take chicken salad in several culinary directions. A modern, Mediterranean style chicken salad, for example, might include imported olives, grilled or roasted red and yellow peppers and chopped fresh thyme, oregano or basil. A more substantial dinner salad could include poached potatoes, cooked tortellini or white beans, or offer variety with a second protein -- cooked shrimp, for example.

Those who appreciate fresh vegetables can mix the chicken with lightly sautÈed wild mushrooms, cooked asparagus, zucchini, green beans or corn, with raw vegetables such as cherry tomatoes or avocado, or with bottled artichoke hearts and oil-cured sun-dried tomatoes.

Cheese and chicken make for an extraordinary salad. The best cheese choices are the blue veined varieties (Saga, Roquefort and Stilton are particularly toothsome here) as well as camembert, gouda, havarti and muenster. If you're looking further for more unusual chicken salads, consider combining the meat with fresh fruit. The most refreshing summer choices include seedless red or green grapes, cut-up cantaloupe, diced mango, peaches or nectarines, and sectioned oranges. Fruit-and-chicken salads take on a satisfying crunch if you add nuts -- cashews, pistachios, smokehouse or toasted almonds, macadamias and peanuts work especially well.

Mayonnaise and mayonnaise based sauces such as Russian or Thousand Island dressings are always appropriate as binders for chicken salad. If you wish to cut dietary saturated fat however, use a vinaigrette dressing instead. Vinaigrette is easy to put together and you can season it with fresh herbs or other flavor ingredients that bring out the best in the chicken.