CHILE (CHILLI) CRISP CHICKEN SALAD
My usual chicken salad is a copycat of the spicy Asian chicken salad Whole Foods used to make when they first opened near me — adding scallions, cilantro, sriracha, red onion, and sesame oil to a plain chicken salad. So I went “duh” when I saw this and realized I had never added chilli crisp to chicken salad despite consuming plenty of both!
Samin provides a recipe for homemade chilli crisp with Calabrian chillies, but I am working my way through the jumbo bottle of LGM (and like it perfectly well), so that’s what I used.
She uses tahini in addition to mayo, and while I considered using toasted sesame paste, I decided I don’t like the flavor enough to risk it, so I stuck with mayo cut with some whole milk greek yogurt, which is my usual base for chicken salad.
I skipped the lemon juice and used all rice vinegar out of preference for a smoother end flavor.
Other components of this salad: scallions, cilantro, sugar, and sesame oil.
This was tasty, but, on balance, I think I prefer my WF copycat which uses sriracha for the heat — the chilli crisp dominates here in a different way.
The other thing I found interesting was that she says Sichuan Bang Bang Chicken was her inspiration for this, but the mayo and tahini take the flavor and texture both very far from that, as well as using lemon juice instead of black vinegar. (But now I do want Bang Bang / Bon Bon Chicken, so there’s that.)
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