Healthy Chicken Salad With Apples

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This fresh and healthy Apple Chicken Salad delivers tender salad greens, crisp apples, succulent grapes, creamy blue cheese, crunchy walnuts, and juicy chopped chicken tossed in creamy apple cider vinaigrette. It’s the perfect protein and fiber-packed lunch or side dish.

Jump to:

• Why You'll Love This Recipe
• Ingredients You'll Need
• Step-By-Step Instructions
• Expert Tips
• Variations
• Storing
• Recipe FAQ's
• More Healthy Salad Recipes
• Healthy Chicken Salad With Apples

Apples are often associated with sweet treats like my Caramel Apple Cupcakes and Glazed Apple Cider Donuts, but they’re also excellent incorporated into savory dishes. For instance, this chicken salad with apples showcases apples (and grapes!) with various savory ingredients that work incredibly well together.

This spin on a deconstructed Waldorf chicken salad includes apples, grapes, walnuts, and a creamy mayonnaise-based dressing. However, unlike a Waldorf salad, this chicken salad is presented as a chopped salad tossed with salad greens and blue cheese crumbles.

This simple chicken salad with apples is a must-make, especially for those that usually scoff at the idea of fruit and nuts in chicken salad. I’m sure everyone will find this chicken salad with apples, grapes, and walnuts sensational.

Why You'll Love This Recipe

• The tastes and textures. This dimensional salad is savory, sharp, sweet, and tangy. Your tastebuds will love the crunch from apples, grapes, and walnuts next to the creamy vinaigrette and blue cheese crumbles, delicate leafy greens, and juicy chicken.
• The homemade dressing. It’s a 5-ingredient creamy apple cider vinaigrette, and it’s DELICIOUS.
• The serving options. This chicken salad serves as both a side dish and a main course.
• The flexibility. You can easily customize the mix-ins, dressing, and so on.

Ingredients You'll Need

For the creamy apple cider vinaigrette dressing:

• Mayonnaise: Mayo provides a thick, tangy base for the dressing. 
• Vegetable Oil: Or any neutral mild-tasting oil, like avocado, canola, sunflower, or olive oil. 
• Apple Cider Vinegar: Use raw, unfiltered, and unpasteurized ACV (like Bragg Organic Apple Cider Vinegar) if possible. Without the added ingredients, it delivers the purest, most natural flavor. 
• Sugar: You’ll only need a teaspoon of sugar to balance the flavor, but if you’d rather use a natural sweetener, try agave, honey, maple syrup, or stevia here. 
• Black Pepper: Use fresh, cracked black pepper if you can. It tastes so much better than pepper that has already been ground.

For the salad:

• Chicken Breast: Cooking a couple of fresh chicken breasts to chop up for chicken salad is super simple, but you can also use leftover chicken. Pulled rotisserie chicken would be perfect. 
• Spring Mix: This usually contains various leafy greens like spinach, arugula, and radicchio, but you can use any lettuce blend here. 
• Apples: Go with an extra crunchy variety that isn’t prone to brown too quickly. I used green apples, but fuji, honeycrisp, pink lady, and envy apples are also delightful tossed in salads. 
• Grapes: For a Waldorf-inspired chicken salad, seedless red grapes are best, but you can use any sweet, seedless grape variety.
• Walnuts: Chopped walnuts are a Waldorf-style salad staple. However, nuts like almonds, pecans, and pistachios are also satisfying in salads made with chicken, apples, and grapes. 
• Blue Cheese Crumbles: If blue cheese is too much for your tastes, use feta, goat cheese, or freshly shredded parmesan or Swiss cheese instead.

Step-By-Step Instructions

Step 1: Cook chicken.

Heat oil in a skillet over medium heat, then add the chicken and sear for 8 minutes, flip and cook on the opposite side until cooked through. Let rest, then chop into bite-sized pieces.

Step 2: Mix dressing.

Combine the mayonnaise, vegetable oil, apple cider vinegar, sugar, and black pepper in a small bowl and stir to combine evenly. Keep covered in the fridge until you’re ready to assemble and serve the salad.

Step 3: Toss and serve.

When ready, toss the lettuce blend and dressing together in a large bowl. Then, dice the apples, halve the grapes and add them to the bowl. Finally, toss in the chicken, walnuts, and blue cheese, and enjoy!

NOTE: You can print the FULL recipe with all ingredients & detailed instructions below!

Expert Tips

• If you’re using raw chicken, you can cook it any way you like (air frying, baking, grilling, poaching, etc.). Most important is that the chicken is cooked to a perfect 165 degrees F and allowed to rest for 5 minutes before chopping so that it’s tender and juicy. 
• You can mix the dressing up to 24 hours in advance and keep it covered in the fridge. This gives the different dimensions of flavor more time to bind and blend. 
• Do not chop the fruit and toss the salad until you’re ready to serve. The delicate apples, grapes, and salad greens will lose their crispness if coated in dressing too soon. Or, if you’d rather serve the dressing on the side, that works too.

Variations

This chicken salad with apples, grapes, and walnuts is full of flavors and textures that pair perfectly together, but there’s always room for more. Try sprucing it up with the following:

• Dried cranberries
• Dried raisins, sultanas, or currants
• Chopped hard-boiled egg
• Chopped celery
• Thinly sliced green onion or red onion
• Fresh chopped herbs like chives, dill, parsley, and tarragon. 
• Sesame seeds (about 1 tablespoon mixed into the dressing)

The creamy apple cider vinaigrette is the best, but you can experiment with other creamy mayo or Greek yogurt-based dressings if you like. For example, try a store-bought sweet vidalia onion dressing or my Creamy Citrus Ginger Dressing.

Storing

Once tossed, this chicken salad with apples is best served ASAP. However, leftovers will keep in an airtight container in the fridge for 2-3 days. If you have extra dressing, it will keep in a covered container in the refrigerator for 3-4 days.

Recipe FAQ's

More Healthy Salad Recipes

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