Fall Chicken Salad With Toasted Curry Mayo
Plus the free herbs that might be sitting in your fridge right now
Happy Friday from me and all my chicken, so much chicken. I’ve been testing a lot of different chicken recipes this week in honor of the beginning of roasting season, and would you know, I’m actually still not tired of it?
As promised, today I’m sharing a recipe for a chicken salad with toasted curry mayo. Chicken salad has long been my next-day lunch whenever I have leftover roast/rotisserie/poached meat because it’s vastly pantry-friendly, especially if you have some pantry produce like celery and/or shallots lying around (future guide to pantry produce forthcoming). This version has all the hallmarks of my favorite kind of chicken salad—an almost 1:1 ratio of meat to crunchy vegetables, raisins plumped in warm vinegar, an indecent-but-not-inappropriate amount of good mayonnaise, and lots of lemon juice and coarsely ground black pepper—but with the ultra-luxe addition of curry powder briefly toasted in a little butter until fragrant and mixed into the mayo.
Last summer I made a small batch of curry powder using a recipe in At Home In the Whole Food Kitchen by Amy Chaplin and I’m still working my way through it. It’s very coriander-heavy, which I enjoy for the herbal top notes it adds to more intense spices such as cumin and cinnamon. You can use any storebought curry powder as long as you can still smell the actual spices as opposed to their dusty shadow. Or if you have a spice mill/grinder or heavy duty mortar and pestle, you can make your own curry powder blend, which I recommend if you have a decent stock of whole spices and are in the mood for a small weekend afternoon project.
My issue with curry powder is that it can taste unpleasantly raw and almost out of place when it gets stirred straight from the jar into mayonnaise. Toasting the curry powder in hot fat (butter, ghee, or a neutral oil all work) helps the spices to “bloom,” which is just a fancy way of saying the spice flavors open up and become more complex-tasting i.e. delicious. Toasted curry mayo is proof that even a dish as humble as chicken salad can benefit from an extra minute spent building flavor.
Because this dish’s clear reference is British coronation chicken (such a weird dish if you read about it), there is, of course, fruit to sweeten the deal. Controversially, I LOVE fruit in chicken salad and only chicken salad (never in tuna UNLESS it’s the cranberry schmear on the Tuna Berry sandwich from Court Street Grocers). With fall comes the best fruit of all, grapes, whose window at the farmers market is tragically short but this makes them all the more covetable to me. I love making this dish with deep purple, blueberry-sized Mars grapes from Cherry Lane Farm at the Union Square Greenmarket; they’re sweet and tart with a distinct but not overpowering tannic bite. But the great thing about fall fruit is that what grows together goes together, and whether you prefer grapes, apples, or Asian and/or Western pears, any sweet/tart/juicy/crunchy fruit will be delicious in this recipe. Or skip the fruit entirely and double up on the warm vinegar raisins.
If you’ve made it this far because you’re waiting to see if I talk about the “free herbs that might be sitting in your fridge right now” that I mentioned in the newsletter dek, reader, I am talking about CELERY LEAVES. I implore you to never again overlook these small, tender, pale green and yellow leaves at the heart of the celery bunch, because they are a lifesaver when you realize all the herbs and scallions in the fridge have gone brown and/or bad but you want something fresh and green to finish off a dish. They have a pleasantly mild anise-y flavor that can pep up a salad, top a chicken or pork chop, top a bowl of soup, and so much more. They also last like three times as long as your average herb bunch. And they’re so cute. Long live celery leaves!
Have a great weekend and catch you all here next week.
–Chaey
