Recipe: Poached chicken salad

Poached chicken salad. Photo / Doug Sherring

Roasting a chicken gives you an oven-to-table option but poaching a chicken opens up other possibilities. It also leaves you with a chicken stock you can use later.

To poach the chicken:

1 In a large pot, cover the chicken with cold water to within ²?³ of the pot's volume. The chicken must be covered in water. Add a peeled onion, a few peeled, diced carrots, 2 celery sticks, a bay leaf, 10 pepper corns, the zest of a lemon, parsley stalks, and a diced leek. If you don't have all these make sure you add the onion, carrot, celery and peppercorns.

2 Bring to the boil slowly and skim of any debris as it forms on the top.

3 Poach the chicken until all the flesh is cooked. Top up with water if you need to during the poaching to keep all the ingredients covered.

4 Remove the chicken and allow to cool a little before keeping it food-safe in the fridge.

5 Strain the poaching liquid and refrigerate.

6 Once the chicken is chilled, remove the skin and shred the flesh from the carcass. Keep the bones.

7 Skim the chilled poaching liquid of the fat that will have set on the top.

8 Add a good dollop of this to the shredded chicken to keep it moist. Return the moistened chicken to the fridge.

9 Add the bones back to the remainder of the poaching liquid, cook it down a bit, strain and you will have a great chicken stock to cool or freeze for use later (in gravies, soups, sauces, etc).

To make the salad:

This could be a big platter on the table, composed into individual plates as an entree or served on a buffet.

1 Mix the shredded chicken with some fresh mango, papaya or melon, peach slices, some halved green grapes, and maybe some nuts (chopped pistachio and almonds are nice).

2 Mix together with mayo to which you have added some fruit chutney. Present on a bed of salad leaves.

If you had leftover roast chicken, you could shred this and mix into some mayo with ingredients with more robust flavours, eg, blanched green beans, walnuts, shredded rocket, finely diced red onion, diced ripe apples or roasted pears.