Middle-eastern chicken & chickpea salad with cumin yoghurt sauce & quick pickles
Rated 5.0 stars by 1 users
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.

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)
For the quick pickles
-
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. 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. 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. Remove the skin and bones from the chicken and tear or shred the meat into pieces.
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.
Recipe Note
Get-Ahead:
• Step 1 can be completed a few days in advance (although both pickles will last for weeks longer). Keep covered in the fridge.
• Step 2 can be prepared up to 3 days in advance, then covered and chilled. The raisin pickle syrup can be added at a later stage, if necessary.
• Step 3 can be prepared up to 3 days ahead (depending on the freshness/use-by date of the chicken, so be vigilant), then covered and chilled.
• The whole recipe can be assembled up to 2 hours in advance, but omit sprinkling the chicken with the salt until just before serving, when it can be sprinkled over the whole salad instead.
Hints & Tips:
• A whole 1.3–1.5kg (raw weight) chicken (900–950g whole cooked weight) yields around 500g of meat.
• To poach a whole chicken, place the whole oven-ready chicken (about 1.3–1.5kg) in a saucepan into which it fits fairly snugly. Barely cover it with water, add a quartered onion, 2 bay leaves, a few black peppercorns and any other aromatics you like. Cover, bring to the boil, then reduce the heat and simmer gently for 1 hour or until cooked through. Remove the pan from the heat and leave the chicken to cool completely in its liquid. When cool, drain the chicken, retain the stock for another use, then skin, de-bone and shred the meat.
• Swap cooked new potatoes, diced small, for the chickpeas, and garnish with some fresh pomegranate seeds, if you like. All the elements of this recipe, including the sauce, are also good stuffed into pitta breads or wraps.