How to Make a GOOD Chicken Spinach Salad

Spinach salad. Nobody knows exactly from which country it hails, but it’s been ruined badly enough in this country for Alton Brown to devote an entire episode to it. But where he was concerned with the construction of the salad, I’m concerned with the technique that goes into making its variation: chicken spinach salad. And rest assured, with a two tweaks, and special attention to technique, absurdly good chicken spinach salad is right within your reach.

Adjustment #1: Don’t grill the chicken, sauté it instead!

Restaurants often grill the chicken in their chicken spinach salad. The grill is fun! The grill is iconic! The grill is also wildly impractical for the average home cook trying to cook no more than 2 chicken breasts! The time that it takes to lug the thing out of storage, ignite the coals and do all the cleanup (to make no mention of managing an open flame) is just silly. Even if you’ve got a gas grill, it still seems impractical to prep it and clean it for such a small amount of meat. That impracticality is exactly why we’re not going to use it for this recipe. Nope! We’re going sauté the chicken instead.

What does it mean to sauté? You cook small batches of small cuts of a food in a small amount of fat (typically 2 tablespoons or so) over high heat. You get a great crust thanks to the Maillard reaction happening at super high speeds and your product stays moist thanks to short cooking times.

SMALL batches of very SMALL cuts of food over VERY HIGH heat for a SHORT period of time. Why are these guidelines so important? Let’s take a look.

Small Batches

How do you avoid crowding the pan (aka cook in small batches)? Make sure that each cut of chicken (or other food) has at LEAST 1 inch of space on every side. It’s that simple.

Cooking in small batches keeps you from crowding the pan. Not crowding the pan means you get to cook at high temperatures. Cooking at high temperatures makes the chemical reactions (like the Maillard reaction) that you want to happen occur quickly. And all of that makes your food turn out moist, with a brown crust that gently cracks open when you bite into the almost creamy interior as your tongue sends a flurry of taste to your brain. You pay roughly 3 dollars for a pound of chicken breast. Don’t let your final product give you anything less than a fantastic experience because YOU decided to crowd the pan.

Small Cuts

Cut your chicken into 1/4″ slices. It’s perfectly fine if you need to use a ruler. But DON’T pound the chicken down to uniform thickness. That works GREAT for some applications (chicken nuggets, anyone?), but it just isn’t necessary here.

Sautéing is a fast cooking method. The faster you cook something, the less mass it can have and still cook properly. Leaving your chicken in big, thick, hulk-sized chunks is just going to leave it underdone in the middle. So what do you do instead?

High Heat

Heat the oil in the pan to at least 350 degrees. Don’t have a thermometer? If you’re using extra-virgin olive oil or butter, you’ll know it’s at 350 when it just barely starts to smoke. If you’re using another oil, then wait until the oil is “shimmering” before you throw your food on the pan. You’ll probably want the pan over medium-high heat for this.

Heat is good. Heat makes things cook quickly. It makes your food safe. It also makes it very, very tasty. So do yourself a favor and don’t be afraid of it. If cavemen conquered fire, you can conquer your fear of high cooking temperatures. So just how hot do you need everything to be?

Short Period of Time

Cook for roughly 3 minutes. 1 minute 30 seconds each side. Longer than that, and you’re most likely cooking for too long, though (and this is important) the only way to know for sure is by using a thermometer and making sure that the chicken is at 160 degrees Fahrenheit.

As long as all of the above steps have been followed correctly, you’ll only need to cook your chicken for a very short period of time. Too long will just turn it into a brick. On the other hand, cooking your chicken for the right amount of time will make it so good that birds line up to be cooked by you . . . or something like that.

 Adjustment #2: Dress lightly, and with flare

No, it isn’t fashion advice (though it TOTALLY could be), but it IS the most important part of getting this whole spinach chicken salad thing right aside from the chicken itself. Let’s look at Star Wars to find out why.

Remember at the end of Episode IV, when the rebellion is celebrating blowing the ever-living tar out of the 1st Death Star and they’re having a big awards ceremony for Han, Luke and mysteriously not Chewie? Just in case you don’t remember, here it is.

It’s a great scene right? But what happens when you cut the music? It looks like this:

Not half as great, right? It’s all because that kickin’ score wasn’t there telling us just how awesome the scene was.

Vinaigrette is your salad’s music. The chicken and poached eggs and greens are great actors and great scripting and blah blah blah, but the vinaigrette is the music. And without the music, things just fall flat.

We’ll have to talk about the science of making vinaigrettes with flare another time, but this recipe has one included, just for you! But with great vinaigrette, comes great responsibility, which is code for DON’T OVERDRESS THE DANG SALAD. Just enough vinaigrette to liiiiiiiightly coat the whole salad is perfect. Any more is overkill and detrimental. So yeah, don’t do it.