The Unmapped Chicken Salad

I think a lot of kids have a mild form of brumotactillophobia–an aversion to different foods touching each other. I also don’t think this is a really traumatic phobia, just a mildly compulsive behavior that a lot of people grow out of. I had it a bit growing up, according to my Mom, and I don’t disbelieve her–I remember being horrified every time she’d mix peas into her spaghetti, and refusing to do the same.

I had another (also common and possibly related) childhood food aversion, the fear of finding hidden bits of crunchy vegetables in food. (Just vegetables–who wouldn’t like to find a bit of crunchy Frito or potato chip or bacon in their food?) I always felt betrayed when I’d bite into a tuna salad or egg salad sandwich to find onion or celery, or god forbid pickle relish. I took my pizzas with cheese or meat–no onions, peppers, mushrooms, or olives; my hot dogs with only ketchup (hey, I was a kid!) and mustard; my burgers plain; and my various other sandwiches with only the named ingredients. If I used a condiment, it was a sauce or something smooth–deviled ham with mustard, bologna and cheese with Miracle Whip and mustard, chicken loaf with a bit of salt and butter.

Things are a bit different these days. I’m not a kid anymore (unless you ask my mom) and I’ve come a long way since then (again, unless you ask my mom). I like all kinds of veggies on my pizza. I drag my hot dogs through the garden (no ketchup though). I’ll put just about any old damn thing on a burger (including chili, in an impending post). There are still vestiges of this former fear though; for example, I still don’t like crunchy bits in egg salad or tuna salad (though I’ve been meaning to try the tuna sub from our friends at J.P. Graziano, with whatever they’d like to put in it up to and including some hot giardiniera).

Chicken salad, for whatever reason, doesn’t trip that intense dislike. Probably because it was never really on the menu when I was a kid, and to be honest it’s never really been a presence in my life in general.

Baby’s First Chicken Salad

Prior to starting this post, the best chicken salad I’d ever had–surely not the first or only chicken salad, though I don’t really remember any others–was from a recipe book Mindy’s parents bought for us at an antique shop’s tea room in the outlying southeastern suburbs of Kansas City.

Mindy had relatives in Kansas, and her parents had the habit of turning a 5-6 hour drive into an 8-10 hour drive by driving back roads and stopping at every fruit stand and small town shop they’d see. There’s something about that kind of road tripping that I admire, but don’t really emulate–a fast Interstate and the shortest possible time in the car are more my ideal. Mindy and I hadn’t been married very long, and our 2 main cookbooks at the time were a collection of lazy recipes using Campbell’s soup that had for some reason been bound as a hardcover, and a paperback guide for college kids called “Help! My Apartment Has a Kitchen“.

On this particular trip, Mike and Linda, Mindy’s parents, stopped at the Greenwood Antique Mall in Greenwood, Missouri, and bought us a little spiral-bound recipe book being sold in their tea room. Several of our favorite recipes from the early years of our marriage came from this book. We don’t use it much anymore but of those recipes, the one whose memory lingers the most is their lemon basil chicken salad.

I don’t want to reprint their recipe without permission, and the tea room is under new ownership since our visit nearly 2 decades ago so I’m not sure any permission I could get from them today would be meaningful. The basic gist of it is poached chicken breast, thin-sliced red onion, grapes, sugar snap peas, and chopped basil leaves in a lemony mayonnaise dressing. I had a few torpedo rolls left over from my post on cheesesteaks, so I made a batch of lemon basil chicken salad for dinner one night and tried it with romaine lettuce in a roll.

Early Findings

I was able to establish a few things from this initial foray into chicken salad. This particular recipe is as great as I remember. The basil leaves and lemony mayonnaise-based dressing are intense, but the bulk of the salad is a very mild poached chicken breast so an intense dressing is actually preferable. The next day, this chicken salad was still very good, but some moisture had been drawn out of the vegetables, diluting the dressing. With a less powerfully flavored dressing, the chicken salad was not as enjoyable.

Also, while my bread was great, it wasn’t right for chicken salad. Torpedo rolls are not the best conveyance for chicken salad, or likely for other “-salad” sandwich fillings. The crust of a good bread roll compresses as you bite into it, and this type of sandwich filling is prone to squishing out of the bread when under compression. Also, though the lettuce did a decent job of slowing it down, eventually the dressing soaked into the bread hinge, causing the entire sandwich to fall apart. For both of these reasons, a good sliced bread would be a better choice.

What’s more, I loved the vegetables in it. The chicken provides the bulk of the dish and the dressing and basil provide the bulk of the flavor, but without the flavor and, more, the texture provided by the onions, grapes, and pea pods, chicken and dressing alone would be boring.

With those things in mind (and surprised at how easily I’d gotten past the traps laid by the hidden crunchy things), I set out to find good chicken salad sandwiches to try in Chicago. But it seems that chicken salad isn’t the kind of thing that inspires 5-star all-caps Yelp reviews. There’s a really expensive Belgian bakery in the Magnificent Mile called Hendrickx (how expensive? They have a $37 loaf of bread on their menu) selling a curried chicken salad sandwich that made #6 on the Chicago Magazine 50 Best Sandwiches list in 2012. Of course, I’ve tried the #1, #2, and #12 sandwiches from that list without thinking much of them (though there are many others that I have liked). That dubious recommendation is about it as far as rave reviews of chicken salad sandwiches in Chicago go.

An Educational Digression

I found a sandwich listed on the menu at Bombacigno’s J&C Inn (recently put back on my radar by Mike Gebert) that intrigued me though. Listed without description under Cold Sandwiches as “Chicken Caesar,” it made me wonder. Is it a chicken salad with an intense garlic-and-anchovy dressing?

Not really. But sort of.

The Chicken Caesar at Bombacigno’s consists of cold whole grilled chicken breasts with leaves of romaine lettuce, copious thick shavings of parmesan cheese, and, yes, an intense garlic-and-anchovy dressing. Chicken salad it was not, but it’s a decent sandwich and I’m glad I tried it. (Their Italian Beef is tremendous though) The chicken breast was a bit dry (not unusual at all for chicken breast), but overall the sandwich was packed with flavor, and it came between 2 slices of an Italian sourdough bread that was fantastic. It was a sliced bread and ideal for chicken salad–it was firm with a great chew and a nice crust but also soft enough to bite through without sending a sandwich’s innards flying in every direction. It was so great, in fact, that I was sure I knew where it must have come from.

D’amato’s is an Italian bakery in Chicago’s West Town that, as I’ve mentioned before, supplies the bread for some of the best sandwiches in town. They also make excellent sheet pizza, often considered an exemplar of the Sicilian/granny style–a thick but not doughy piece of bread minimally topped with some sauce, a topping (I like the fennel-accented sausage, though if you like 100% coverage pepperoni is the way to go. There’s also spinach, veggie, and supreme pizzas, but I haven’t tried them), and just a bare sprinkling of pecorino cheese, practically invisible to the eye but definitely noticeable on the palate.

They also do cannoli, arancini, focaccia, cookies, pastries, etc, and they’re all great. I had one negative customer service experience there several years ago that put me off the place for a while, but I’ve been going back quite frequently lately without any issues.

I was sure that I’d find the Bombacigno’s bread here (in another article, Mike Gebert verified that Bombacigno’s sources their bread from D’Amato’s so I was going on more than a hunch), but I didn’t realize I’d see it before I even walked in the door.

D’Amato’s sells this bread in large and small Vienna loaves, in rounds, and in baguettes. The large Vienna loaf was what I was after, sliced for sandwiches.

Great sandwiches start with great bread–another thing I’ve often said. What to put in the bread though?

Grocery Store Chicken Salads

I’d heard good things about chicken salad from Mariano’s, an upscale grocery chain that has had locations sprouting like weeds all over Chicago the past few years. The day I visited, they had two chicken salads available in the deli. I bought a little of each and some red butterhead lettuce for sandwiches.

Their Old Fashioned Rotisserie Chicken Salad has been available on other occasions I’ve visited Mariano’s and is likely what people are thinking of when they talk about Mariano’s chicken salad. As the name suggests, it’s pretty standard, mayonnaise-based with chunks of chicken breast and a fairly typical onion/celery mix. It’s a decent version of the standard chicken salad. The chicken’s taste and texture was better than the poached chicken in my lemon basil chicken salad–the name of this salad suggests they’re using leftover rotisserie chicken, and I’m not surprised that it would taste better.

The other was a grape and walnut chicken salad with–you guessed it–grapes and walnuts, but also green onions and a thicker dressing than the mayo-based version of the old-fashioned rotisserie version. I liked it as well–the grapes reminded me of my lemon basil chicken salad. The Wikipedia article on chicken salad suggests that the original form of American chicken salad was served in 1863 and contained grapes, though the Food Timeline has at least one older reference for American chicken salad. Regardless, I really like the grapes, and walnuts are an inspired addition as well.

City Fresh Market in Ogilvie station’s French Market also has a number of chicken salads available. Since it’s conveniently across the street from my office, and since I do things like eat lunch, I stopped in to check them out as well.

Their curry chicken salad, with raisins and slivers of almond, was not bad, similar to the Coronation chicken salad I’d made for the British Rail Sandwich post I did in January, though I think mine was better, with golden raisins instead of standard, toasted ground curry spices, and freshly broiled chicken.

Their Cajun chicken salad though–not good. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what about it they thought was Cajun. There was a bit of a chili powder flavor, with shredded carrots and green onions, a touch of chili heat but it was, on the whole, forgettable. Maybe it had been sitting around a while, or maybe it just didn’t have enough variety in it. Maybe it was the chicken, which had a dry, shredded texture instead of the chunks most other chicken salads were using. Overall, it was just a failure on every level, and I threw out a great deal of it.

A Unified Field Theory of Chicken Salad

So far, I’ve learned a few things about chicken salad sandwiches:

1. Chicken breast is boring.
   1. A corollary: who’s to say we have to use breast meat? or at least, only breast meat
   2. Also, how you cook the chicken matters
2. Plain mayo is fine but an intense dressing is even better to gussy up the blandness of chicken.
3. A good sliced bread works better than the best, crustiest roll.
4. The fresher, the better–not just the ingredients, but the salad itself.
5. Crunchy is good. Veggies make it more interesting.

The Scientific Method

Based on these guidelines, I wanted to try making another chicken salad myself. I thought about doing a chicken Caesar like I thought I’d be getting at Bombacigno’s, but I wasn’t sure what vegetables would be appropriate other than romaine lettuce. The distinguishing features of a Caesar salad are the dressing, the parmesan, the lettuce, and the croutons. Seems like with a Caesar, you put the bread into the salad rather than the other way around.

I did have another idea that I thought would meet all my criteria though–a Buffalo chicken salad. I’d buy a rotisserie chicken and use a combination of breast and thigh meat, to make the chicken more interesting. The dressing would essentially be a homemade bleu cheese dressing with hot sauce mixed in, definitely intense. I’d mix it up fresh at lunchtime with plenty of celery (and some onion) for crunch and serve it on the good D’amato’s Italian sourdough.

Here’s the thing–there must be a 6th, hidden criterion, an X factor. I liked the Buffalo chicken salad, but it didn’t wow me the way I’d hoped. The chicken was great, I liked the crunch of the celery, the kick of the hot sauce, the funk of the bleu cheese. All the elements were there.

But with actual Buffalo chicken wings, all those elements are discrete. There’s the fatty, crispy chicken wing, coated in the buttery hot sauce; the cool, crisp celery; and the creamy, funky bleu cheese dressing. Each element is present in varying degrees from bite to bite as desired by the eater, not all whipped together and homogenized. It tasted good, sure, but the whole was less than the sum of its parts.

And I guess that’s the final guideline in making an excellent chicken salad sandwich. Finding a combination that works better together than each ingredient would individually.

The Things I Do For Sandwiches

But what about that Belgian chicken salad sandwich from the expensive bakery? Did I ever try that?

I left work for an early lunch on a Friday, grabbing a Divvy bike and managing to roll about 1 block before the rain hit. I was determined to get this final sandwich though, so I continued, taking Kinzie over the bridge into River North, then turning left onto Franklin, a slow side street, for most of my northbound leg before I’d cut east to the Magnificent Mile.

I’d gotten just past Grand, I think, when the driver’s side door of an Acura flew open and hit me in the side, then snagged the bicycle pedal. I was spun around, my phone flying from my shirt pocket to land in the street as the bike and I parted ways in midair before my head struck asphalt. Thankfully, I was wearing a helmet and was able to slowly get up and collect myself and my phone, while the driver sat swearing under his breath and looking at the damage to his car door.

I can’t say I was very nice to him–I called him some names and probably hurt his feelings a bit–but in my defense, I was simultaneously woozy yet churning with adrenaline, unable to think clearly. He explained that he’d patiently waited for the Mercedes ahead of me to go by before he’d opened the door. He blamed me for the damage to the car. He equated my injuries to his property damage, brusquely suggested that we call it quits and both get on with our lives, then walked away. I was still a bit stunned and let him go.

I’ve been told I should report the accident, and I called 311 to little effect. I probably shouldn’t be writing about this here. But in time, I did end up making it to Hendrickx.

No veggies in this chicken salad, just chicken with a curry mayo on excellent bread. If I was just eating the chicken salad, I’d want something to break up the texture of chicken & mayo, but if you consider this chicken salad as mostly just an enhancement for this bread, it did its job well.

It wasn’t worth what I went through to get it though.