How to make this Super-Easy 4-Ingredient Chicken Salad
It’s hard to imagine a more satisfying, delicious, and easy-to-make dish than this 4-ingredient chicken salad that pleases the palates of ketoers and non-ketoers alike. It’s also a great way to use a leftover chicken if you happen to have some lurking in your fridge. Otherwise, rotisserie chicken is another easy choice.
Since I want to make things as easy as possible, I use frozen chopped onion in this dish. Chopping onion is not my favorite chore, so to save some time and tears (literally!), I often buy frozen chopped onion from the store. Actually, for this dish, you don’t have to defrost the onion. It will melt in seconds once you’ve mixed it in with the rest of the ingredients.
That’s it, let’s take a look at how to make this simple, rich, and satisfying salad:
Take 2/3 cup (160 ml) cubed cooked chicken and add it to a bowl.
Add 3 tablespoons mayonnaise…
…2 tablespoons chopped onion…
…and 1 teaspoon Cajun seasoning.
Mix…
…until well combined.
Ready! Easy, wasn’t it?
Enjoy as filling in keto sandwiches or tortillas or simply on a slice of keto bread. This salad also makes an excellent main course when served on lettuce leaves or with mixed salad greens.
How I came up with this chicken salad recipe
So, I had made keto tortillas using my baking mix and needed to take the photo for the recipe book. For the photo, I wanted to fill the tortilla with a savory filling. Immediately, I thought some kind of mayonnaise-based salad would be just perfect. Who could resist a tortilla that is oozing out rich and succulent salad? Not me.
I was pondering a few seconds of what that rich and succulent mayonnaise-based salad should contain. In the fridge, I had some cooked chicken. Now, that would be a perfect, satisfying base for my salad.
But as chicken has a very mild taste, it required something spicy. I definitely wanted to eat my tortilla and the filling, not just come up with something inedible but great looking for the photo. So, things had to be authentic.
Since Cajun seasoning is one of my favorite seasoning mixes, I decided to add some Cajun seasoning to my chicken salad. But would it be enough to lend flavor to the salad with mild-tasting chicken and rich, fatty mayo?
In the freezer, I had some chopped frozen onion. That sounded like a perfect addition to the salad. When raw, it would provide some texture as well. And naturally, a sharp, piquant taste.
I eyeballed the ingredients and mixed them together. I filled my tortilla with the chicken salad and shot the photos. Only after that, I tasted the salad.
Boy, was it delicious!
I was totally astonished how you can make something so delicious so fast, and with so few ingredients. Maybe this superb salad would be something for my blog? But, no, it’s far too simple! Anybody can come up with this kind of recipe, I thought.
But on the other hand, as the salad was so easy and simple and so delicious, I was hoping that you, my dear reader, can appreciate it anyway and take it to your repertoire of easy keto recipes.
So, to make the salad a proper recipe, I needed to do more careful calculations. I actually used too little mayonnaise in my first calculations and the resulting experiment, so I increased the amount by one tablespoon. It’s naturally the mayonnaise that binds all the ingredients together and makes the salad rich and succulent, so it’s better to use enough mayonnaise.
Here’s the recipe for you to enjoy:
Super-Easy 4-Ingredient Chicken Salad
Yield:
2
Prep Time:
5 minutes
Total Time:
5 minutes
Ingredients
Instructions
Combine all ingredients in a small bowl. Mix well.
Use as a filling in keto sandwiches or tortillas, or serve as a light main course on mixed salad greens or lettuce leaves.
Recommended Products
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Frontier Cajun Seasoning Certified Organic, 2.08-Ounce Bottle
Frontier Co-op Cajun Seasoning, Certified Organic, Kosher, Salt-Free | 1 lb. Bulk Bag
7-Day Keto-Vegan Detox Meal Plan: Detox your body, lose weight, and maximize your health with a ketogenic vegan, gluten-free, grain-free, sugar-free low-carb meal plan
Low Sugar, So Simple: 100 Delicious Low-Sugar, Low-Carb, Gluten-Free Recipes for Eating Clean and Living Healthy
Nutrition information
In total
Per serving if 2 servings in total
Protein
41.2 g
20.6 g
Fat
61.6 g
30.8 g
Net carbs
1.1 g
0.6 g
kcal
718 kcal
359 kcal
Tips for variation
The most obvious way to give some variation to this easy keto dish is to use different seasonings. Feel free to replace the Cajun seasoning with Montreal Steak Spice, Montreal Chicken Seasoning, barbecue seasoning, blackening seasoning, or maybe with something exotic like ras el hanout, dukkah, or garam masala.
This dish uses raw onion to maximize the flavor. If you are not a fan of the sharp taste of raw onion, feel free to cook it first until translucent and then add with the rest of the ingredients.
If you are a garlic lover, add one or two cloves of crushed garlic to this salad.
Instead of chicken, feel free to use any other cooked meat like ham, shrimp, tuna, or another type of fish. Nothing prevents you from replacing the meat with cheese. I recommend sharp cheese like Swiss cheese or sharp Cheddar cheese.
And if you don’t eat anything animal-based, you can replace the meat with a crispy keto-friendly veggie like radish, daikon, cauliflower, broccoli, cucumber, zucchini, or celery. As regular mayonnaise contains eggs, you can use keto-vegan mayonnaise instead. Don’t use commercial vegan mayonnaise, they are full of harmful ingredients starting from terrible vegetable oils and food additives. And usually, they taste plain awful.
You can actually turn this salad easily into a spread. Process the ingredients in a food processor or in a blender until paste-like. Serve as a dip or as a spread. Yum!
General prattling
This week, I’ve again worked on the Ketokamu baking mix and the recipe book related to it, as you noticed. I’ve developed lots of recipes using the mix and shot photos.
(Well, the last photo is about my cat, Pete, who looks so relaxed.)
On Friday, we gathered with our Ketokamu core team at my home. In addition to discussing business, we did some product development. Here’s the wife of our CEO testing one product that we are going to launch soon. We have been fine-tuning the product lately, and now it seems to be final.
The Ketokamu members naturally tasted my baked goods as well. Actually, I shot these blog photos and videos while they were visiting, so they were enjoying the chicken sandwiches after my photo session. By the way, I had used the Ketokamu baking mix for the bread I used for the photos with this chicken salad.
Here’s our CEO, Olli Kolehmainen, enjoying a sandwich.
We also shot some photos outside and posted them on social media.
