Chicken Salad with Sesame Tahini Dressing

What Can I Say? I’m Crazy About These Kinds of Meals.

Those of you who’ve been following me for years know how I feel about salads. They’re at the top of my list of favorite things to eat. Now I’m not talking about lackluster sad green salads with a slice of a bad tomato thrown in for good measure. No one is thrilled about eating one of those pitiful things.

I’m talking about interesting ingredients put together in unexpected ways with both deep and bright flavors – where every bite is something different and I guarantee it will excite your tastebuds. Oh, hell, yes. My kind of food. This is one of those recipes that can be made with a purchased rotisserie chicken and there is nothing at all wrong with that. But if you’ve got an extra 30 minutes, poaching skin-on and bone-in chicken breasts is very much worth the effort. By allowing the breasts to cool in their cooking liquid, they remain juicy, and not at all dry. I cook the breasts about an hour before I serve them and this gives them plenty of time to cool to room temperature. I usually make more than I need for a particular recipe and then I have them on hand in the fridge for sandwiches, etc. later in the week. 

This Sesame Tahini Dressing is one you’ll want to keep on hand. Double the recipe and you can keep it for a couple of weeks in the fridge to use on other salads. Just throw a shallot, garlic, ginger, a little brown sugar, soy sauce, white miso, rice vinegar, tahini ,* vegetable oil, and sesame oil into a blender and whip it up. Stir in both white and black sesame seeds and you’ve got an incredibly flavorful dressing. 

The base for this salad is red cabbage and I want to say a few words on this subject. Both red and green cabbage are some of the most versatile of ingredients. Sliced raw, they couldn’t taste more differently than when wedges are roasted in the oven. And then you can braise it, add a little vinegar and sugar, and you’ve got a beautiful side dish. I could go on and on about my love for cabbage, but you get the picture. I used half a head of red cabbage in this recipe and I’ll soon post about what I did with the other half. I guess the point I’m trying to make is that cabbage is not boring. Far from it. I particularly love using it in salads because it stays crisp and doesn’t get soggy.

The same goes for Korean radish or daikon radish. Both of these stay nice and crisp and I love the crunch it adds to this salad. Because I used both sliced cabbage and sliced onions I chose to cut the radish up into little cubes, rather than slicing it up, which made it more fun to eat. I like to slice my chicken breasts fairly thickly – about 1/3 inch thick. The poached breasts are so tender you can cut through them with a fork. 

I felt the salad needed a little chili heat, so I sliced up a mild red chili pepper and scattered it on top, along with a good handful of flat leaf parsley leaves, and some salted peanuts. For the final touch I went to my good old standby of crispy fried shallots. I’ve mentioned that I keep a jar of these in my pantry most all the time. Yes, you can certainly fry up your own, but it sure is nice not have to go to that trouble. Some brands are much better than others and this is my favorite brand – Maesri Fried Shallot .* 

But wait until you taste the dressing. It is so good on this salad (and other salads, too). Creamy, but nice and sharp. It’s the perfect accompaniment to all these ingredients. 

So, please tell me, doesn’t this sound like a meal you’d enjoy eating? Nothing dull in the whole deal. Every bite is a joy. And yes, the leftovers are excellent, too.