All You Need To Liven Up Store-Bought Chicken Salad Is Pickle Juice
Chicken salad is a lot like pizza in that even when it's not that great, it's still pretty good. It's easy to make chicken salad with a few ingredients you have on hand. All you need is some cooked chicken, mayonnaise, and maybe some simple veggies and spices if you're feeling fancy. But if you're starting from scratch, it can take at least a half-hour just to make the chicken. Who's got time for that, especially when store-made salad is plentiful?
Store-bought chicken salad is quick, convenient, and comes in all kinds of tasty varieties, such as Trader Joe's "Wine Country" with cranberries and pecans and Whole Foods' "Sonoma" with grapes and poppy seeds. Toss a container in the cart, and you can dress up a boring croissant or meal prep for a weeks' worth of lunches.
Unfortunately, as with all salads dressed with mayonnaise, store-bought versions can be bland. The good news is, there are a lot of ways to make a ho-hum container of chicken salad sing. You probably have an ingredient on hand right now that can make a tub of creamy chicken chunks taste positively homemade: a jar of pickles.
Add some acid
A basic chicken salad is something of a blank slate. Both of the main ingredients, chicken and mayonnaise, can be combined with all kinds of flavors, so you can experiment with adding herbs, spices, fruits and vegetables.
Store-bought mayonnaise alone, however, is always going to taste pretty one-note, unless you add some sort of acid to brighten up the flavor. The New York Times, suggests "adding a bit of acidity — in the form of citrus juice, a few drops of vinegar or a little sour cream or yogurt." If your tub of chicken salad isn't making the grade, add a few tablespoons of lemon or lime juice to perk it up.
Even easier than citrus juice, however, is to use a few spoonfuls of pickle juice from your favorite jar in the fridge. It's already made (no squeezing required), and it's got extra flavors of dill and garlic that will bring some complexity to your salad. You can also use the juice from olives, capers, or anything else in your fridge that's bottled with brine.
Keep customizing
Once you have your store-model salad tasting a little zippier with a little pickle juice, don't stop there. You already have the pickle jar out — go ahead and chop up a couple of the spears to add even more bright, acidic flavor as well as a little crunchy texture. You can also use different varieties of pickles, such as spicy bread and butter slices or salty cornichons.
Cucumbers, of course, aren't the only vegetable that gets pickled, so don't be afraid to explore all the different veggies in jars for chicken salad fodder. Try adding a few spoonfuls of juice and some chopped pickled hot peppers, such as jalapeños or banana peppers, if you like a spicy salad. You could also use some giardiniera, a mix of pickled vegetables, to give your salad a little extra bulk.
You can also experiment with adding different kinds of olives, or you can chop up pickled artichoke hearts, roasted red peppers, or mushrooms. The antipasto bar at any decent grocery store is the perfect place for scoping out pickled ingredients to try without committing to a whole jar of something you might not like. Just make sure when you're scooping up your briny veggies that you add a few big spoonfuls of juice.