How To Make Chinese Chicken Salad

A favorite over the years in Chinese restaurants, we have to make Chinese Chicken Salad ourselves to get it gluten free. This salad can be made by shredding a rotisserie chicken, which makes it really easy and affordable.

This recipe is gluten free.

Watch A Video

Here is a video of 2 Cooks in the Kitchen making Chinese Chicken Salad

Ingredients For Chinese Chicken Salad

Dressing:

• 1/4 Cup Vegetable Oil
• 2 Tbls Brown Sugar
• 1 Tbls Rice Vinegar
• 3 Tbls Toasted Sesame Oil
• 2 tsp Tamari

Salad

• 6 Cups Shredded Lettuce
• 3 Cups Shredded Chicken
• 3 Green Onions, sliced
• 1 Tbls Sesame Seeds, toasted
• 1/4 Cup Oil for frying
• 2 oz Rice Noodles

Toast the Sesame Seeds

We’ll start by toasting the sesame seeds. We put a dry frying pan on a medium hot burner, add the sesame seeds and toast them, stirring frequently until they turn golden. Once they start to change color it goes quickly so you have to stir a lot and be careful not to burn them.

Once the sesame seeds are toasted we will put them in a small bowl and set aside.

Make the Dressing

We’ll make our dressing in a half pint jar with a lid. That way we can just shake the jar to mix the dressing before we pour it on the salads. We will start with 1/4 cup of vegetable oil. If you want to experiment with the flavor, some or all of this could be sesame oil.

Brown Sugar

We’ll add the brown sugar next. Doing the dry ingredient first, we can use the same tablespoon measure for the wet ingredients. 2 tablespoons of brown sugar are just right for this dressing.

Rice Vinegar

We want a little vinegar flavor in our dressing but not too much. We’ve made it with more before and we prefer this salad with just 1 tablespoon of rice vinegar or rice wine vinegar. Again, you can adjust this to your own taste.

Toasted Sesame Oil

Toasted sesame oil is the main flavor we want in this dressing. We are adding 3 tablespoons. As we said above, you can use sesame oil for part or all of the vegetable oil for an even stronger flavor.

Tamari

We are using Tamari to keep this dressing gluten free. We’ll add two teaspoons of Tamari to get that umami saltiness. That’s everything that goes into our dressing. We’ll put the cover on the jar and set it aside until our salad is ready.

Rice Noodles

We are going to fry some rice noodles which we will add to the salad last. We will be using approximately 2 ounces of noodles. You don’t have to be exact on the measurement.

Break the Noodles

We have found that this works better with smaller pieces of noodle so we will break them into smaller pieces. You can do this a few noodles at a time and just break them by hand. We’ve tried cutting them and that isn’t a lot easier.

Hot Oil

We are going to put the noodle pieces right into some hot oil, cooking them in small batches. Every single noodle needs to make contact with the oil so we need to have enough oil in the pan to accomplish this. One way you could do this is deep frying the noodles. You could have larger noodle pieces doing this. We are trying to limit the amount of oil, so just 1/4 cup or so in our pan and adding the noodles a few at a time.

Puffed Noodles

As soon as they hit the oil our noodles puff up. You’ll see that any noddles that don’t touch the oil stay hard and clear so you can stir those into the oil.

Drain the Noodles

Once the noodles are all puffed we will remove them to a paper towel covered plate to drain any excess oil. Repeat the process with the rest of the noodles. If the pan gets too dry you will need to add more oil and let it get hot. The first time we tried this was a bit of trial and error but you’ll get the hang of it quickly.

Assemble the Chicken Salad

We’ll start by putting our 6 cups of shredded lettuce in a large salad bowl. We like romaine or iceberg for this salad. We find it easier to get a nice shred with iceberg while the romaine comes out more of a chopped texture but either one works.

Shredded Chicken

Next we’ll add our 3 cups of shredded chicken. We get a $5 rotisserie chicken from Costco and shred it for things like this. We’ll get at least 6 cups of shredded meat out of one chicken plus some snacks. You’ll find this is a good strategy to make meals more affordably.

Mix

We want to get the lettuce and chicken mixed well so they are even throughout our salad.

Toasted Sesame Seeds

Now we will add the sesame seeds we toasted earlier.

Green Onions

And lastly for our chicken salad we will add our sliced green onions. Then we will mix this all thoroughly one more time.

Serving

We will put our salad into bowls. We eat a meal size salad for dinner every other day so we are making two salads with this recipe. You can easily make this into four or more smaller servings. We’ll put our fried rice noodles on top.

Dressing

Then we will shake our dressing well to be sure all the sugar is dissolved and pour it over the salads.

Salt

Finally we will finish the chicken salads with a sprinkle of salt. We have some deep sea salt we brought back from Kona. This salt comes from water from 2300 feet below sea level. This water hasn’t seen the surface for over 100 years, contains different minerals than surface water and doesn’t have any micro plastics.

That’s it for our Chinese Chicken Salad. If you enjoyed this recipe subscribe to our Youtube Channel and share on social media. Leave us a message and let us know of any other recipes you’d like to see us work on.

Here are some other salad recipes you might enjoy making:

• Bacon Blue Cheese Chopped Wedge Salad
• Green Goddess Salad Dressing and Dip
• Wilted Spinach Salad
• Caesar Salad
• Taco Salad

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