Tuna, egg, and chicken salad | homemade mascarpone dressing

a chopped cold protein bound in something creamy usually mayonnaise flavored with some other stuff and usually eaten as a sandwich filling that is what salad means in this context for those who didn't grow up eating this for lunch all the time it's one of my favorite things to eat especially the egg salad i'm going to show you that i'm going to show you tuna salad and chicken salad and hopefully give you some ideas about how you can play with the basic concept lots of ways to be creative here basic tuna salad first these days you have the can or you have the pouch either is fine but if you use the can you have to drain it first they have to add way more water or oil to get a good seal inside the can i always just squeeze the lid into the can to wring out the water the vacuum pouch has hardly any water in it why not just cook fresh tuna for this i don't know it seems like kind of a waste for something so special as fresh tuna this whole sandwich evolved as a way to make the cheap canned stuff palatable i say go with it and the mayonnaise works great because the fish is so lean i always just eyeball a few scoops at first you can mix in more later for onion to me this is so a job for shallots i want the crunch so i want to use a lot of onion and relatively big pieces shallots are mild so you can do that without completely blowing your head off with onion steak my parents always used the dried onion flakes or a powder from a bottle this is the secret i didn't learn until i moved to the south sweet pickle relish when my time comes bury me with this it makes everything amazing it might improve chocolate chip cookies it definitely makes tuna salad to die for grind in a bunch of pepper and i believe my love of garlic powder might have begun with this meal my folks always use that with the dried onion and no salt yet the tuna is usually pretty salty stir stir stir and oh i forgot the celery so good in these cold salads some people dice it i like to do thin slices across the whole stock i want that crunch to contrast with the soft fish and the creamy dressing and that goes and since you have it you might as well grab some of those leaves from the celery they taste amazing and they'll be pretty and green in here have a little taste yeah that needs a little salt but not much and for me i like the quantity of mayo in there but i think most people would find that a little dry i'll mix some more in lettuce is always nice to put on the sandwich if you have it and i quite like tomatoes if you've never had tuna salad soaked in sweet pickle relish before get ready for your life to change my friend so good and it's such a great thing to mix up in advance and eat for lunch for the next few days same deal with the egg salad we always make it with a whole dozen eggs first you gotta hard boil them some people say add vinegar and or salt to the boil water they say this will make the shell easier to peel i've never noticed the difference what has made a difference that i've noticed is dropping the eggs into already boiling water that seems to make the white pull away from the shell a bit oops i cracked one there it doesn't matter cover so it comes back up to a boil real fast and a chef friend of mine told me that 14 minutes is the ideal time for hard boiled it seems to work great and that gives me plenty of time to head out to the garden and catch up on the world of business finance and tech with morning brew the sponsor of this video hey like my wheat i used to work in the news business and i'm quite glad that i don't anymore it's very bad for the digestion but the flip side is now basically the only way that i stay informed about anything is by endlessly doom scrolling on twitter which is also bad for the digestion so morningbrew morningbrew is a free daily newsletter all the news i need about money and tech and such is here such as what even is an nft and should i spend tens of thousands of dollars on one i mean everybody else is apparently morning brew is written for busy people and laid out for busy people each newsletter is super skimmable and the copy is funny and fun there's no reason to not subscribe to morningbrew it's free in your email and takes less than 15 seconds to sign up for do us both a favor and sign up using my link morningbrood.comadamr or click the link in the description thank you morningbrew now 14 minutes is up a lot of people would pull these out to an ice water bath with a slotted spoon or a spider or something a much easier option i think is to just drain through the pot lid drop it in the sink and spray them with cool water it doesn't matter if the water isn't ice cold between the convection and the water being constantly replaced as the pot spills over these eggs are going to be cooled off in no time yeah this uses some water but so would washing the big bowl that you used for the ice bath okay lauren is going to take this one from here she's an ace with egg salad she just smacks the egg all over with the back of a spoon focusing on the bottom where there's usually a little hollow she flips the spoon around pushes the edge up under the shell there nice that one came off all in one piece yeah give each one a rinse and repeat and for egg salad you're going to be chopping it all up into little bits anyway so who cares if you take a chunk out of the side of one of these get them all over to the cutting board and slice them in half lauren's approach to egg salad is inspired by deviled eggs and with deviled eggs you push all the cooked yolks out into a bowl and then you smash them smooth with your mayonnaise and such i think you end up needing almost equal parts mayo and egg yolk but she's smart to be conservative up front you can always add more in the south they dump in a ton of sweet pickle relish which is why southern deviled eggs are so much better also great in deviled eggs is a sinus clearing quantity of mustard a little salt and pepper and if you taste this now just remember that it needs to be strong enough to flavor all of this bland protein over here so it should be too strong for deviled eggs you would pipe the filling preciously back into each egg half it's much easier to just dice each of these up and dump them in the yellow stuff and because this is egg salad not deviled eggs i think that you want a fair bit of crunchy stuff in there an egg salad sandwich is so soft and mushy unless you have some fresh onion or again in this case some coarsely chopped shallot and i would use celery but lauren hates celery so how about some cucumber a nice mild taste won't drown out the subtle taste of the egg just tons of fresh watery crunch i usually leave some peel on it for color cut a half in half and then i'll kind of do three or four radial cuts so that i can now really easily get triangular thin slices again the goal is crunchy texture so i think it's nice to have wide pieces those are really going to freshen up this salad lauren thinks she put in too much salt let's have a taste now i think the salt is great but i'm going to want more shallot in there the onion flavor mellows as this sits in the fridge so i try to overshoot it that cucumber released some water overnight so if you use that and maybe undershoot the moisture a bit another good way to contrast the soft texture is to toast your bread lightly toast it if the toast is too rigid you'll squish the pieces together with your teeth and end up squeezing the salad out the sides like toothpaste i think egg salad is easier to eat on little rolls speaking of delicious things they introduced me to here in the south very nice okay let's talk chicken salad my folks used to use canned chicken but i think this is a perfect occasion to use a grocery store rotisserie chicken they're absurdly cheap they taste pretty good and they're soft so you can just pull the meat apart into chunks into the bowl whenever you're picking meat to mix into some other stuff i think you want to start with chunks that feel a little too big remember they're going to break apart and shred a bit as we stir them in with everything else the white meat on these chickens tends to be pretty dry but who cares we're going to cover this in mayo actually let's use something else this time a fancy alternative is mascarpone cheese italian cream cheese two problems though mascarpone is a little too thick and it can be kind of hard to find the solution to both issues is to make our own like two cups of whipping cream a pint four or five hundred mils medium heat just barely bring it up to a simmer and then juice in a lemon at least half a lemon for this much cream i ended up using the whole thing you'll see the acid instantly coagulate the cream and thicken it up to make mascarpone you would now put this in a cheesecloth and let it drain overnight but we would then have to thin it out with water or milk to get it loose enough to coat the chicken so let's just not do any of that let's just call this done here it is after it cools down a delicious spread in its own right and you may think wow that's pretty indulgent putting cream into chicken salad but i mean what is this now maybe 60 percent fat at this point mayo is like 95 percent fat so this is actually the light option and darn tasty and say you don't want to use shallots a bunch of green onions works great for all the same reasons mild flavor when raw a little crunch but not too much i did thin slices down at the firm white end and i'm doing progressively bigger pieces as we get up into the greens which are more like a fresh herb we get some nice green color in there to boot say you don't want to use the sweet pickle relish again how about some sweet corn shave off of kernels and you've got a hit of sugar that really helps this what you don't get from the corn is any acid fruit has acidity and sweetness which is why a lot of people use apple in chicken salad or grapes like these are very nice half is going to be too big i'm gonna go quarters there we go these will give us the brightening that we would get from the relish unfortunately grapes are soft and i want even more crunch so nuts any kind these are pistachios love them once you get them out of their shells you do probably want to smash them or chop them a bit not too much the whole point is to have some texture in there pepper a little bit of salt to start with rotisserie chickens are already pretty salty a little parsley is nice if you've got it and give this a preliminary stir i can see that i'll probably need the rest of my thickened acidified cream whatever you want to call it the lemon in there really freshens up the taste of the chicken oh and i forgot my garlic powder the best that's some pretty fancy stuff as chicken salad goes the one hitch is the cream really stiffens up in the fridge a virtue of mayo is that it's pretty much the same consistency at any temperature the cream you might want to let warm up a bit before you eat it but man is it tasty and any of these ideas could transfer to any of the other recipes mix up a bowl and have lunch taken care of for the next three or four days

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 2,795,447

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Id: wSn8Yzz_QbA

Length: 9min 23sec (563 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 08 2021