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Chicken salad is a versatile and easy lunch meal. However, it is all too easy to make too much, so what can you do with the leftovers? Can you freeze them?
Why not make your very own Old-Fashioned Chicken Salad Recipe so that you can freeze it? Or just make this Classic Cobb Salad Recipe instead?
Can you Freeze Chicken Salad?
Unlike many other big meals you can make for many people, chicken salad has a bit of a problem; it has a lot of mayonnaise in it.
Mayonnaise is a fat emulsion, meaning that it only works when the emulsion isn’t disturbed by very high or low temperatures. If you try to freeze a big glob of chicken salad that is full of mayonnaise, you may notice some significant fat separation when you thaw it out.
To avoid this, you have two options: You can try substituting the mayonnaise with something that freezes better, or you can avoid adding the mayo altogether.
Mayonnaise Substitutes For Better Freezing
Mayonnaise may be super tasty and an excellent binder for chicken salad ingredients, but it doesn’t freeze very well.
If you notice a lot of fat separation in your frozen salads, try subbing out the mayo for something like whipped salad dressing or a simple vinaigrette instead. The ingredients in those substitutions don’t clump up and separate in the freezer as mayo does, resulting in a much better freezing experience. However, mayonnaise is vital in the chicken salad.
Hold The Mayo Until You Are Ready To Freeze
If you are concerned about losing all of the great flavors that mayonnaise offers, you can also simply not add it to the salad when preparing it.
When serving it, simply take a portion of the other ingredients and put it into a bowl. Then, add the requisite amount of mayonnaise and mix well.
This keeps the mayo separate from the rest of the ingredients, letting you bag up any leftovers without mayonnaise and quickly freeze them for later.
How To Prepare Your Chicken Salad For Freezing
The other thing to remember when trying to freeze chicken salad is that you need to get it ready for freezing well before serving it.
A big problem with trying to store something as volatile and quick to decompose as chicken salad is that the longer it stays out, the less you are going to want to keep it for later.
To help avoid your chicken salad going wrong, why not try to keep it protected from the elements?
Some plastic wrap put over the top of the bowl is the very least you should probably do, but you can also keep it out of the sun or even just keep it in the fridge and only take it out when people actively want to take a portion for themselves to make a sandwich.
Just try to make sure that your chicken salad doesn’t go bad before you freeze it—it would be a real shame to defrost some chicken salad in a week’s time only to discover that it was already pretty off before it ever saw the freezer.
How To Freeze Your Chicken Salad
Assuming you did all of the necessary steps to ensure that your chicken salad is safe to eat and ready to freeze, actually getting it frozen is pretty simple.
If you plan on eating all of the leftovers at once, like at a family dinner or even another significant social event, you can just freeze the whole bowl or, if the bowl is too big to fit in your freezer, in a big Ziploc resealable bag.
However, you could also freeze them in individual portions to make handy lunch portions of homemade chicken salad!
Just portion out how much chicken salad you think you would want as a lunch portion into either a Ziploc bag or a freezer-safe container with a sealable lid. This lets you take out and enjoy a small and convenient portion of chicken salad whenever you like!
If you removed the mayonnaise to make it more freezer-friendly, you could even add the mayo when you eat your lunch portion, saving even more freezer space!
Looking for more How-To guides? Why not try these recipes:
• Can You Freeze Cream Cheese?
Happy cooking
Love,
Karlynn
Old-Fashioned Chicken Salad Recipe
Ingredients
Salad Ingredients
- 3 cups cooked chicken chopped
- 3/4 cup chopped celery
- 1/4 cup finely chopped onion
Dressing Ingredients
- 1/2 cup mayonnaise to taste
- 1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice this is to taste
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1/4 teaspoon celery salt
- 1/8 teaspoon ground black pepper
- 1/4 teaspoon paprika
Instructions
- Place the salad ingredients into a medium sized bowl.
- Stir together the dressing ingredients in a bowl, adjusting the lemon to taste. Add to the salad ingredients and gently stir them until the ingredients are well combined.
- Use in lettuce leaf wraps, in sandwiches or just by itself!
Notes
- diced apples
- diced hard boiled eggs
- sliced grapes
Nutrition
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