9 Chicken Salad Recipes for Easy Weekday Meals

Jazz up leftover chicken or just satisfy a craving for chicken salad with one of these seven takes on the lunchtime staple.

By
Yasmine Maggio
Yasmine Maggio
Associate Editor
Yasmine is an Associate Editor at Serious Eats. Her work has been featured in Women’s Health and on L’Officiel USA, and she recently graduated from New York University with a master's in journalism. You can find her at Bleecker Street Pizza on any given weekend.
Learn about Serious Eats' Editorial Process
Updated August 21, 2024
Overhead view of buffalo chicken salad

Serious Eats / Robby Lozano

I don’t eat chicken salad a lot, but when I do, it’s from Costco. It's so tender, creamy, and perfectly seasoned that I have a hard time not eating the whole thing (which is probably meant to serve at least four people) in one sitting. But there are times when I can’t get to Costco, and desperate times call for desperate measures. For some, desperate might mean placing an Instacart order to have the chicken salad delivered (I promise I haven’t done this...yet). But for me, that means taking matters into my own hands and making a big bowl of the good stuff myself.

At the heart of a great chicken salad is juicy, tender meat. The best way we’ve found to achieve this is by cooking your chicken sous vide. By adding aromatics like lemon and herbs to the sous vide bags, you can also infuse the chicken with better flavor. But leftover roast chicken will work for these preparations, too, whether you're making our classic chicken salad (which just might be better than the Costco version), or one of our many variations. With not one, but seven delicious recipes to choose from, I have no reason not to kick my Costco chicken salad obsession to the curb. The only thing that’s left to do is choose between piling it on toasted bread or digging in with a spoon.

September 2020

More Serious Eats Recipes