Chicken and Radicchio Salad with Pickled Raisins and Walnuts Recipe on Food52 (2024)

Author Notes

Chicken, radicchio, pickled raisins, and walnuts is one of those rare combinations of ingredients that adds up to so much more than the sum of its parts. This salad has seen several incarnations, each attempt really just served as an excuse to consume big bowls of "crunchiness" for dinner each night after night. The first involved the often hard-to-find Deglet Noor dates, which I pitted, julienned, and used in place of the raisins in the recipe below (if you have access to good fresh dates, I highly recommend this!). I tried it with feta and without (on the notion that everything tastes better with feta). I tossed some almonds out and some walnuts in. Each time I’ve composed this delicious dish, I increased the amount of fresh herbs -- sprinklings turned into handfuls of torn mint, parsley, and cilantro, until eventually they were a substantial part of the composition, rather than mere background colors. —Michelle McKenzie

Test Kitchen Notes

WHO: Michelle McKenzie is a professional chef from San Francisco.
WHAT: A sweet and bitter salad for a brown bag lunch or a quick and satisfying weekday meal.
HOW: Make a simple vinaigrette out of Meyer lemon juice, shallots, and extra-virgin olive oil in a large bowl. Add the meat from two roasted chicken breasts, pulled into bite-sized pieces, radicchio, and generous handfuls of torn parsley, cilantro, and mint. Toss with lightly-roasted chopped walnuts and raisins, pickled in a honey vinegar mixture for garnish.
WHY WE LOVE IT: The pickled raisins in this salad are revelatory -- sour, plump, and sweet -- and even better when tossed with the juicy chicken, toasty walnuts, radicchio, and herbs. The only alteration we made was to add more lemon juice to this nearly-perfect salad. —The Editors

What You'll Need

Ingredients

• For the salad:
• 2 chicken breasts, preferably bone-in with skin
  
• ¹/₂ cupextra-virgin olive oil, divided
  
• 1 pinchsea salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
  
• 2 cupswalnuts
  
• 1 tablespoonwalnut oil
  
• ¹/₂ lemon, preferably Meyer
  
• 2 medium shallots, finely diced
  
• 2 small heads radicchio, Chioggia, or Treviso, thinly sliced
  
• ¹/₂ cuppickled raisins (see recipe below)
  
• 1 handfulparsley, torn
  
• 1 handfulcilantro, torn
  
• 1 handfulmint, torn
  

• For the pickled raisins:
• 1 ¹/₂ cupsgolden raisins
  
• ³/₄ cupwater
  
• ¹/₄ cupchampagne vinegar
  
• 6 tablespoonshoney
  
• 1 fresh bay leaf
  
• 3 juniper berries
  
• 1 ¹/₂ teaspoonssea salt