Lighten Up Chicken Salad With An Ingredient You Already Have In Your Fridge

The best kinds of simple foods are not just delicious but can be easily modified to add new flavors depending on what you're craving. Chicken salad is the perfect example. By adding yogurt, an ingredient you likely have somewhere in your fridge, you can enjoy chicken salad in a whole new way.

While you may prefer a mayo-heavy chicken salad, a few tablespoons of yogurt (whether you're getting standard, Greek, or other European-style yogurts, plain is recommended) can be a real game changer. It works well as a substitute for or as an addition to mayonnaise, helping to make your chicken salad richer and even more flavorful.

It also gives your salad a nice creamy texture and can help cut through the heaviness of ingredients like chicken or the strong flavors of ingredients like onion or mustard. As a bonus, Greek yogurt is also packed with protein, so it's an easy mix-in if you want a little more of a nutritional punch.

No matter if you grew up eating chicken salad or it's become a staple food in your diet as an adult, it's a staple grocery item that most people have on hand. You can make it savory with a simple grocery store rotisserie chicken, celery, onion, and parsley or you can make it sweet with grapes, nuts, and apples. Any way you prep it, yogurt is the secret ingredient you need to liven up your chicken salad.

Chicken salad is pretty versatile, but so is creamy Greek Yogurt and even plain yogurt which can be jazzed up in many different ways. It can be used to add creaminess to a flavorful fruit smoothie, it can used in other salad dishes like macaroni salad, or you can spice up your breakfast with an elaborate parfait with your yogurt of choice as the base. So if you've got a container of plain yogurt in the fridge, break it out and add it to your next batch of chicken salad. It's a flavorful and creamy addition to many recipes and yet criminally underrated for this ability.