Middle-eastern chicken & chickpea salad with cumin yoghurt sauce & quick pickles

servings

Serves 6 – 8 (6 big appetites!) as a main course salad (or serves 10 as part of a feast)

This is unbelievably quick and easy to put together and enormously popular. It’s fresh, tasty and very healthy, without seeming at all ‘goodie-goodie’. A great ‘get ahead’ recipe for hot summer days and (much as I love it!) a nice change from Coronation Chicken. It is also an inexpensive way of feeding a lot of people, and if you use ready-cooked chicken, it is really just an assembly job.

Middle-eastern chicken & chickpea salad with cumin yoghurt sauce & quick pickles

ingredients

  • 1 whole cooked chicken (900–950g cooked weight), or poach your own (see Hints & Tips)

  • 160g baby spinach leaves

  • ground sumac, for sprinkling

  • 1 x 400g tin chickpeas, drained, rinsed and dried on a clean tea towel (or kitchen paper)

  • 1 teaspoon onion or nigella seeds

  • warm, chargrilled or griddled pitta breads or flatbreads, to serve (optional)

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  • 70g raisins

  • 1 red onion, halved and very finely sliced (I use a mandolin)

  • 90ml white wine vinegar

  • 31/2 tablespoons granulated sugar

  • 1 teaspoon sea salt

  • For the sauce 1 tablespoon olive oil

  • 2 teaspoons cumin seeds

  • 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon

  • 300g thick Greek-style yoghurt

  • sea salt, to taste

directions

  1. 1. The quick pickles need to be made at least 2 hours in advance (see Get Ahead). Put the raisins into one small bowl and the red onion into another. Put the vinegar, sugar and salt in a small pan and bring to the boil, stirring occasionally to dissolve the sugar, then simmer for 1 minute. Remove from the heat and pour just enough of the pickling liquid over the raisins to barely cover, then pour the remainder over the onion. Set aside, stirring from time to time. Wash the pan.

  2. 2. When you are ready to eat, make the sauce. Heat the olive oil in the same pan on a medium heat, add the cumin seeds and stir for a minute or so, until fragrant. Tip into a heatproof bowl, then add the remaining sauce ingredients, plus the (drained) raisin pickle syrup to taste (you may not need it all). Taste, adjust the salt or syrup as necessary and let down with a little cold water to the desired consistency, if necessary. Set aside.

  3. 3. Remove the skin and bones from the chicken and tear or shred the meat into pieces.

  4. 4. To serve, spread the spinach leaves over a large platter, followed by the chicken and a sprinkling of salt, then the chickpeas, a drizzle of the sauce, the drained raisins, the drained pickled red onion (discard the pickling syrup), some more sauce, then lastly, a sprinkling of sumac and the onion or nigella seeds. Serve the remaining sauce separately, and serve with warm, chargrilled or griddled pitta breads or flatbreads, if you like.