Gochujang chicken salad
This is a beautifully simple salad with a lil Asian spin. Get yourself a tub of gochujang if you don’t have one already. You should be able to find this at major supermarkets or specialist stores. Luckily a little goes a long way but going by how I eat it, stock up.
What is gochujang?
Gochujang is a sweet and spicy fermented condiment used widely in Korean cooking. Despite the sweet description it is very much savory so probs not best to add to your dessert. It is a hot pepper paste, but it’s not as spicy as other hot sauces, but it’s best used to add depth to a dish. You can use it on chicken wings, bibimbap tacos, soups, stews, braises, marinades, rice dishes or salads, as I do here. It’s quite a strong flavour so you don’t need heaps to flavour a dish!
Substitutes you could also try include ssamjang, Sriracha and Thai red curry paste. These will have differing levels of spiciness so bear that in mind if you’re not amazing with spice.
You can watch me make the dish (vaguely) here as part of my ‘what a chef eats in a day series’ on TikTok. I was unemployed at this point due to covid and cooking was the only thing keeping me sane. My family were incredibly well-fed during lockdown and I was incredibly desperate for a job.
For more recipe inspo, check out more here.
Ingredients
- 1 carrot
- ¼ green cabbage
- ¼ red cabbage
- 1 stick celery
- 5-6 cherry tomatoes
- Handful of cooked shredded chicken
- 1 tsp gochujang
- ¼ cucumber
Method
- Peel the carrot and chop on an angle into thin slices and halve the cherry tomatoes. Cut the celery into the same sized slices and shred both types of cabbage.
- In a frying pan over a high heat quickly stir fry the vegetables together with a drizzle of oil until softened slightly. Stir in the gochujang and add in the shredded chicken to warm through.
- Slice up the cucumber into matchstick sized pieces and serve up the stir fry, topping with the cucumber.