Dutch Curried Chicken Sandwich Salad

Deliciously spicy and creamy chicken salad is the perfect addition to a good loaf of bread, crackers, or toast.
By Ena Scheerstra

We eat a lot of bread in the Netherlands, so logically we have a wide variety of things we like to put on our bread. Salads are one of those things. You buy it in a tub in the supermarket, it consists of ingredients (often a protein and some vegetables) mixed with a mayonnaise based sauce, and you dollop it on top of your bread for lunch (or on small crackers/toasts as party food). You have traditional flavours like tuna, salmon, crab, celeriac, egg, meat and curried chicken, but also more adventurous/modern varieties like old cheese, cream cheese-piemento, egg-bacon, chicken-melon, chicken-satay, and chicken-pesto. Of course it is fast to buy them, but if you have a bit more time you can easily make them yourself. On the photo I piled the curried chicken salad on top of a simple slice of whole-grain bread, but for some variation you can use all kinds of sliced bread, artisan bread, bread rolls and crackers, basically any vehicle for salad you can think of. Other great additions are lettuce, cucumber, tomato or shredded vegetable salad.

The recipe below is really the most basic recipe for curried chicken salad. You can replace half of the mayonnaise with yoghurt, cream cheese, quark, sour cream or crème fraîche for a different flavour, or replace it with low-fat mayonnaise or yogonaise. Excellent additions to the salad are pineapple, apple, mandarin, raisins, almonds, spring onion, celeriac, gherkins, parsley and mustard (but maybe not all of them together).

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