The secret of successful salads lies in the correct proportion of nutritious and refreshing ingredients. Even if the appetizer consists of only greens, mayonnaise or fatty aioli sauce will make the dish saturate. And of course, it is simply impossible to compose a salad of meat or fish alone. Something else needs to be added. And ideal in terms of the ratio of saturating and refreshing components is a salad with chicken and cucumber. Skinless chicken breast is considered the most dietary type of meat. It contains little fat (about two percent), but a lot of protein. Some people do not like chicken fillet, considering it dry and too fresh, inexpressive. But in combination with cucumber, the taste of meat will be transformed. It will acquire freshness, juiciness and aroma. There are a lot of salad recipes with chicken and cucumber, and the most successful ones will be given in this article. In addition to the two main ingredients, you can enter additional ones: boiled eggs, cheese, herbs, canned corn and more. You can experiment with cucumber (fresh, salted or pickled), as well as chicken (boiled, smoked, fried). Each time, dressing salad with different sauce, you get a new dish. And in this regard, a truly wide choice is being opened before us. Olive oil, mayonnaise, sour cream, soy sauce, vinegar and lemon juice, mustard and honey - all to your taste.
Classic Chicken and Cucumber Salad Recipe
This dish is completely dietary. For him, we need one greenhouse cucumber (or two ground) and 150-200 grams of boiled chicken breast. How to cook meat? If you have not chopped fillet, but chicken, use the following instructions. First remove the skin. Then we make an incision along the sternum and cut off the white meat on both sides. The pieces are uneven. They are thick on one end and thin on the other. We make an incision and turn the meat around to make one plate of about the same size. Put the fillet in a pan, fill with water, put on medium heat. After boiling, salt. If desired, spices can be added. After five minutes of boiling, make the fire under the pan minimal and cook under the lid for another quarter of an hour. Cool the breast. Meanwhile, we clean the cucumber and cut it into thin strips. Parse the cooled fillet into fibers of approximately the same shape. Salad with chicken and fresh cucumbers can also be served on a regular dish. But let's show imagination! Serve it on lettuce leaves or on Chinese cabbage. Or bake a pancake and wrap a snack like shawarma in it. And how to season a salad? Below are a few ideas for sauces for two appetizer ingredients.
Mayonnaise, sour cream and other dressings
If you follow the figure, put in a salad with chicken and fresh cucumbers a few tablespoons of natural yogurt 0% fat. This dairy product can also be mixed with finely chopped parsley or dill. The dish will become mouth-watering and fragrant if you grate several garlic cloves with salt and olive oil in a mortar. And here’s the recipe for a complicated refueling. Pour two tablespoons of olive oil and soy sauce into a jar with a screw cap, add a little more apple cider vinegar, a pinch of cane (brown) sugar, black pepper and chopped green cilantro. Squeeze two cloves of garlic through a press. Screw on the lid and shake the jar like a cocktail shaker until the olive oil mixes with the other ingredients. Pour the mixture of chicken and cucumber with this sauce. Put in the refrigerator for an hour. After that, the finished dish can be laid out on lettuce leaves. The most high-calorie dressing option is mayonnaise mixed with grated cheese. But in this case, we put less meat in the dish, and more cucumber.
We increase the composition of the ingredients
Now we will have not two dominants in the taste of the dish, but three. These include, among others, a salad with chicken, cucumber and egg. Meat and vegetables for the dish should be taken in approximately the same proportions. Three hundred grams of chicken breast will need two eggs. There are several options for this salad. The simplest is to boil hard-boiled eggs, peel and cut, like other main components, in small cubes. Such a salad can be seasoned with mayonnaise. But it would be wrong to ignore such an original recipe. Cucumbers and boiled chicken (300 grams each) are cut into strips. Finely chop three cloves of garlic, cut a small bunch of green onions. If desired, the fourth dominant of taste, sweet bell pepper of red or orange color, can also be introduced into the salad with chicken, cucumber and egg. We wash the pod, cut it in half, carefully clean the seeds, rinse again and shred the straw. Mix the mass. Season with five tablespoons of soy sauce, a small amount of mustard, a pinch of sugar and salt. Put the salad in the refrigerator for at least half an hour. In the meantime, beat two eggs in a bowl. We heat the pan with a small amount of a mixture of vegetable and butter. Pour the beaten eggs and bake a pancake. When it cools, cut it into strips and add to the salad. You can not mix.
Winter salad
For lack of fresh vegetables, we turn to home-made preparations. Such a salad with chicken and pickles is called Stolichniy. Although some consider it to be just a variety of Olivier. And there is a certain logic in such a comparison. Judge for yourself: the composition of the salad includes potatoes, eggs, carrots, canned green peas, pickles. Unless we add onions, not onions, but green ones, but instead of sausages we use chicken fillet. If you put it about three hundred grams, such a salad will replace a full dinner. Not afraid of extra calories? Season the salad with mayonnaise. Losing weight as a sauce is suitable for yogurt or sour cream. How to cook a salad "Capital"? Anyone who has ever done olivier at least once in his life will easily cope with this task. Boil the chicken breast until tender, as described above. Two potatoes and one carrot are cooked in “uniforms”. Three hard boiled eggs. Peel the vegetables. All the ingredients are cut into small cubes. We strain the can of canned peas. For the Stolichniy salad, we need only a hundred grams. Cut a couple of feathers of green onions. Finely chop fresh dill. Knead all the ingredients. Salt, add black ground pepper. Season with sour cream, yogurt or mayonnaise.
The smell of smoked meat
The aroma of light haze will give the whole dish a more expressive, vibrant taste. Yes, and our concerns will be reduced. It is enough to buy a ready-made thigh or chicken leg, remove the meat from the bone and prepare a salad with smoked chicken and cucumber. And if you add hard cheese to the ingredients, then with such a hearty dish you can completely replace lunch or dinner. Three or four cucumbers are peeled, cut into cubes (can be semicircles). We cut the smoked meat from the bone into fibers into oblong pieces. One hundred grams of cheese with three large chips. Squeeze through a press or finely chop two cloves of garlic. Mix them with cheese. Then add to the smoked chicken and cucumbers. Salt and pepper the salad. You can fill it with ordinary olive oil. In this case, the toast should be served with toasted toasts or croutons. You can also season the salad with mayonnaise. But then the dish may seem too heavy. It is best to dilute mayonnaise with sour cream, or even season with yogurt sauce with a little ketchup or adjika.
Autumn salad
At a time when the harvest of mushrooms will be so great that you won’t know where to put them, remember this recipe. For him, not only mushrooms or boletus, but ordinary mushrooms are suitable. Salad with chicken, mushrooms and cucumbers is very simple to prepare. Cut the stalk of leek into rings. Coarsely rub the carrots. Pour vegetable oil into the pan. First we fry leek, then add carrots to it and at the end - peeled and cut mushrooms (200 grams). Salt and season with spices. We shift from the pan to the salad bowl. For the dish, you can use both boiled breast and smoked chicken meat - 300 g. Two pickled or pickled cucumbers will add kislinki to the salad. We cut them, like meat, into cubes. Hard boil three eggs. Clean and cut into cubes. Mix the salad. Now let's do the refueling. We drive 2 yolks into a jar with a lid. Mix them with two teaspoons of mustard. Add 50 milliliters of olive oil and the juice of one lemon. Screw the lid and beat the contents of the can until a suspension is formed. At the end, salt the sauce and add two garlic cloves squeezed through a press. Dress the salad. Mix and let it soak a little.
Another mushroom salad recipe
Here we will prepare a snack with fresh cucumbers. The dominant taste will be chicken and mushrooms. Cucumbers only refresh a hearty snack. We put in different saucepan 300 grams of chicken (best breast), 400 g of mushrooms and two eggs. While these ingredients are subjected to heat treatment, peel and cut into strips three cucumbers, chop the onion finely. Mushrooms, if they are raw cut into plates, it is enough to boil in salted water for only five minutes. We strain them in a colander. Hard-boiled meat and eggs are cut into equal cubes. Mix all the ingredients. Salad with chicken, cucumber and mushrooms, salt to taste, pepper and season with mayonnaise. My salad leaves. We cover the dish with them. We spread the salad on this green mattress . Sprinkle with chopped dill.
Light salad with grapefruit
Chicken meat is ideally combined with fruits, and especially with citrus fruits. And in this recipe we will use not only a large grapefruit, but also a quarter of a lemon and a third of an orange. We begin to prepare a salad of chicken, cucumbers, grapefruit with culinary processing of meat. You can boil the breast or grate its curry and quickly fry in vegetable oil until golden brown. Smoked chicken or grilled chicken will also be delicious. We clean one small onion and finely chop the half rings. Squeeze the juice out of a piece of lemon. Further, the recipe recommends doing salad dressing so that it has time to brew. Pour three tablespoons of vegetable oil into a bowl. Squeeze the garlic tooth through the press, season with a pinch of black ground pepper. Now pour a teaspoon of liquid honey, soy and Worcester sauces. Beat the mixture with a whisk. We return to the preparation of the salad itself. Cut the cooled chicken into thin slices. Greenhouse long cucumber can not be cleaned. Shred it in semicircles. Pink grapefruit will have to tinker with. We need to clean it not only of the peel, but also of thin films, which give the fruit bitterness. Cut the pulp into large pieces. We begin to lay the salad. First, on a flat dish, tear with our hands a few leaves of Beijing cabbage. It can be replaced with green salad. All other components of the dish (chicken, onion, cucumber and grapefruit) are mixed, salt to taste. Spread on lettuce leaves. Sprinkle with sesame seeds and water with dressing. The dish should stand for a while before serving to soak in the sauce.
Snack Prague
Along with the traditional Olivier, salad with prunes, chicken and cucumber appears more and more often on holiday tables. Dried fruits give the whole dish the original taste of smoked meats and a sweet note that sounds amazing in the chord with sour pickles. We traditionally start preparing Prague salad from boiling until chicken is cooked. We need 250 grams of it. In parallel, cook hard-boiled two eggs and medium carrots in a “uniform”. Prunes (150 grams) are washed and soaked for ten minutes in hot water. We clean carrots and eggs. From the swollen prunes, we select the seeds. "Prague" is a puff salad. Therefore, the ingredients are not mixed. At the bottom of the salad bowl, first lay half the chicken fillet, chopped into a small cube. Lightly pepper the meat, salt and apply the mayonnaise net. Grind a large pickle (or two small ones) in the same way as a breast. Cover with a layer of chopped half of the bulb on top. Next, complement the salad of chicken, cucumbers and prunes with eggs, grated with small chips. We lay a layer of carrots on them. Her three are big. Again apply the mayonnaise grid. We spread three to four tablespoons of canned green peas. We put the remaining meat on it, which we again lubricate with mayonnaise. The swollen prunes are drained and cut into strips. This is the topmost layer of lettuce. Tighten the dish with cling film and put in the refrigerator for an hour. When serving, decorate with leaves of fresh herbs.
Salad with Chicken, Cucumber and Cheese
And this delicious appetizer completes our selection of recipes. All three main ingredients should be present in the salad in approximately equal proportions. Chicken meat can be either grilled or boiled, fried or smoked. The chef remains the same free choice for cucumbers. You can take fresh vegetables, salted or pickled. But cheese is most often used hard varieties. Although a much fresher snack will come out if you crumble cheese into it, feta or tender mozzarella. As for dressing, many people prefer to use mayonnaise. But the dish will only win if you take sour cream or natural yogurt instead. It should be said that the components used for salad with chicken and cucumber (egg and cheese) still need additional refreshing elements. It can be: olives (black or green), sweet bell pepper, radish, leek, other greens. Now for the eggs. They can be used not only traditionally - hard boiled and cut. Recall how the world-famous Caesar is being prepared. For this salad, eggs are lowered for a minute in boiled water removed from the stove, and then they are driven into a half-baked mass with the rest of the ingredients.