Rotisserie Chicken Salad

This 10-minute Rotisserie Chicken Salad recipe is a basic recipe customizable to your needs—a delicious lunch for one, two, or a crowd.

Jump To (scroll for more)

• 🐓Ingredients
• 👨‍🍳How to Make Rotisserie Chicken Salad
• ✔️Tips
• ↕️How to make this a "for two" or "family size" recipe
• ❓FAQs
• ❄️Storage and Safety
• Step-by-Step Photo Instructions
• 📖 Recipe

Most people think of chicken salad as a summer salad, but we eat it year-round for light meals. It is a great way to use that leftover chicken and other things you have around.

Basic chicken salad is chicken, mayonnaise, and celery for crunch. But that is very basic. I added some other common ingredients to the recipe but provided multiple options to make it your own.

By using low-fat mayonnaise, the calories will decrease from 255 to 132, and the fat will reduce from 25 to 10.3 grams of fat. This will make it a healthy chicken salad that fits a healthy diet like a low-calorie, low-fat diet, and low-carb keto diet. It is already gluten-free.

This easy chicken salad recipe only takes a little work and a few ingredients—follow the easy step-by-step photo instructions for a quick and delicious meal.

Serve in a wrap, sandwich, on lettuce, or eat it with crackers.

For a more eloquent chicken salad, see Waldorf Chicken Salad. And other picnic or brunch recipes, like Caprese Pasta Salad, Broccoli Salad with Bacon and Raisins, Simple Spinach Salad, Broccoli Slaw, and Chipotle Chicken Salad.

Inspired by Martha Stewart's Classic Chicken Salad with a few minor changes

🐓Ingredients

• Chicken—rotisserie or other precooked chicken
• Mayonnaise—or Miracle Whip—may be low-fat
• Vegetables—celery, red onion, or other onion like green onions
• Pantry ingredients—lemon juice, dry parsley, Dijon mustard, salt, black pepper
• Optional ingredients
  • Nuts—Almonds. Pecans, Walnuts, Cashews.
  • Spices—Garlic, Paprika, Curry Powder, Cayenne Pepper
  • Fruits—Grapes, Raisins, Craisins, Apples
  • Other—Bell Peppers, Olives, Hard Boiled Eggs, Pickles, Pickled Jalapenos

👨‍🍳How to Make Rotisserie Chicken Salad

1. Dice celery and red onion and combine rotisserie or precooked chicken, mayo, lemon juice, Dijon mustard, and spices.
2. Mix well. Refrigerate for an hour to let the flavors combine if you have time. Then serve in a wrap, sandwich, or with crackers.

✔️Tips

• The most common way to get your chicken is leftover rotisserie chicken. But any leftover or precooked chicken will work.
• Most chicken salad is made with a ratio of 2 cups of chicken to ½ cup of mayonnaise. But there is some room for personal preference. So adjust the volume of mayo to the dryness of the salad you like.
• You can use Miracle Whip or Mayonnaise. It can be low-fat or regular.
• Some people will use plain Greek yogurt to replace the mayonnaise, but I like mayonnaise.
• The lemon juice can be fresh if you have it. A medium lemon will have about 2 tablespoons of juice.
• Almost all chicken salad has some onion. General diced green or red onion is usually used. I include mustard and parsley, also.

↕️How to make this a "for two" or "family size" recipe

This is a very easy recipe to decrease or increase in size.

The full recipe makes 4 servings. Perfect for our "for two" household for two meals. But you can easily adjust it to make it for one or two servings. Also, easy to increase to as many servings as you want.

1. Use the recipe card and adjust the number of servings needed.
2. Use the amount of ingredients in the ingredient list, not the instructions—those do not adjust.

❓FAQs

❄️Storage and Safety

Chicken salad should be sealed in an airtight container and will last refrigerated for 4 days. The mayo and the vegetables do not freeze well, so freezing is not recommended.

A food safety note. Like all foods, discard if left at room temperature for 2 hours or more. If using several days old chicken, that time counts when talking maximum time until discarding.

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Step-by-Step Photo Instructions

Dice 1 stalk of celery and half a small red onion.

Combine the celery and onion with 2 cups diced or shredded chicken, ½ cup mayo, ½ teaspoon parsley, 1 tablespoon lemon juice, ½ teaspoon Dijon mustard, ½ teaspoon salt, and ¼ teaspoon pepper. Add other options if desired.

Mix well. If you have time, refrigerate it for at least an hour to allow the flavors to come together. Then serve on a sandwich, salad, crackers, or wrap.

📖 Recipe

Editor's Note: Originally Published December 16, 2012. Updated with expanded options, refreshed photos, and a table of contents to help navigation.