Chicken and Cabbage Salad with Fish Sauce Vinaigrette will be your new obsession. All power protein, fiber-full vegetables, and the tangy, umami-rich dressing that's so good, it'll make you want to eat salad for every meal. Shall we?
Explore More
- Is Chicken and Cabbage Salad Healthy?
- Is this the Same Salad as Gỏi Gà Bắp Cải in Vietnamese Restaurants?
- What Ingredients You Need for Chicken and Cabbage Salad
- What Kind of Cabbage Should I Use for Salad?
- How Many Pounds is a Head of Cabbage?
- Instructions for How to Make Chicken and Cabbage Salad
- Pro Tips and Techniques for Chicken and Cabbage Salad
- Tools and Equipment
- FAQ
- How to Eat More Cabbage
- Chicken and Cabbage Salad with Fish Sauce Vinaigrette
Is Chicken and Cabbage Salad Healthy?
Depending on your health needs and dietary considerations, Chicken and Cabbage Salad is healthy!
Let's break down some of the nutritional highlights, starting with the most underrated nutrition hero in your kitchen, cabbage. Cabbage is the founding member of the famously healthy Brassicas family along with broccoli/Brussels/cauliflower/kale. It is a non-starchy vegetable that not only adds subtle, natural sweetness to a dish, but is especially good for the body in the fall and winter months when other colorful vegetables seem to be in shorter supply.
Cabbage provides a number of nutritional benefits like:
- fiber, which contributes to good gut health, decreases cholesterol, and lowers blood sugar
- surprisingly, vitamin C
- additional antioxidants, primarily in the form of sulforaphane that fight inflammation, and cancer-fighting anthocyanins in purple/red cabbage
- glucosinolates and suforaphane with have strong anti-cancer and liver detox properties
(source: USDA)
Chicken and Cabbage Salad Health and Diet Considerations
This recipe for Chicken and Cabbage Salad is:
- gluten-free
- dairy-free
- refined sugar-free
- anti-inflammatory
- anti-oxidant rich
Is this the Same Salad as Gỏi Gà Bắp Cải in Vietnamese Restaurants?
Yes! And, well, let me explain. The traditional Goi
What Ingredients You Need for Chicken and Cabbage Salad
Salad ingredients:
- Chicken, cooked and shredded, 2 breasts, or about 3 cups
- Cabbage, ½ head or about 1½ pounds green or red or combination!
- Carrot, 1 large, finely julienned
- Red onion, ¼, cut lengthwise into paper-thin slices
- Cilantro, ¼ cup leaves
- Mint, ¼ cup leaves
optional: coarsely chopped roasted peanuts
Fish Sauce Vinaigrette aka "Nuoc Cham" Dressing ingredients:
- Garlic, 2 cloves minced
- Ginger, 1-inch piece grated
- Lime, 1-2 or enough to make 2 tablespoons juice
- Apple cider or rice vinegar, ¼ cup
- Fish sauce, 2 tablespoons
- Maple syrup, 1 tablespoon plus more to taste (can sub any equivalent amount of sugar or sweetener)
optional: finely minced jalapeño, serrano, or Thai bird chile pepper (in order of spiciness!)
What to Do with Fish Sauce
What Kind of Cabbage Should I Use for Salad?
Just your regular ol' round green cabbage, with the green, smooth leaves, is the one I use in this recipe.
However, any type of cabbage—ruffly savoy, purple, even napa—works for this recipe. And using a combination with red cabbage not only adds color but different antioxidants! The nutritional profiles across the types are generally fairly similar. Some varieties are milder in flavor than others, but in this recipe, the differences are not noticeable because of the flavors of the other ingredients, namely the dressing.
How Many Pounds is a Head of Cabbage?
Because cabbages come in different types, sizes, and density (how tightly packed the leaves are), it's better to "measure" cabbage by actual pounds, not by number of heads.
According to the USDA, an "average" cabbage weighs between 2 and 3 pounds.
This recipe calls for half a head, which equals:
- 1½ pounds, or 24 ounces, of cabbage
- about 6 cups shredded
Additional Ingredients Notes, Substitutions, and Resources
Chicken. Store-bought rotisserie chicken is your BEST FRIEND for this recipe. In fact, I have never actually cooked chicken with the express intent of making this salad. I prefer the chicken breast because it's easy to shred, but using the dark meat will give you a LOT more flavor and a slightly different nutrition profile.
Fish sauce: This brand has been my favorite for years available at Whole Foods if you can't get to an Asian market, and this one I've tried recently and like, too!
Apple Cider Vinegar. Most recipes for fish sauce vinaigrette or dressing will call for plain white distilled or rice vinegar. My preference is for Apple Cider Vinegar which has far less bite and more interesting flavor than plain ol' vinegar and is more readily available/affordable (to me) than rice vinegar. Any brand of apple cider vinegar "ACV" works as long as it has the "mother" which looks like a mysterious dark floating figure in the bottle. The mother is what causes the fermentation! This generic store brand of organic Apple Cider Vinegar is generally the most affordable where I shop. This is the well-known apple cider vineger brand that's available everywhere.
Rice Vinegar. I use this brand organic brown rice vinegar.
Maple Syrup. I use an organic maple syrup. You can substitute with other sweetener of choice.
Garlic, Onions and all other fresh herbs and produce from either the Santa Monica Farmers' Market on Wednesday, Mar Vista Farmers Market on Sunday, or Whole Foods Market when I can't find what I need at the farmers' market.
Instructions for How to Make Chicken and Cabbage Salad
The KEY to making this salad is shredding the cabbage as finely as possible. Super fine shreds of the cabbage not only make it easier to chew and digest, but the tangly shreds grip onto the dressing better. In fact, all of the ingredients are similarly shredded or julienned for the same reason.
As a side note, the long, tangly shreds make the salad easier to pick up with chopsticks.
There are a few tips and tricks along the way that will make this, or any, salad, the best salad of your life.
Make Dressing First. Whisk or shake in a jar together minced garlic, grated ginger, lime juice, vinegar, fish sauce, maple syrup, and minced chile pepper if using.
If you haven't already, slice red onion into paper-thin slices and soak in a small bowl of ice cold water for 10-15 minutes to soften the "bite" on raw onions while you prep the remaining ingredients.
If you like the punch of raw onions, you can skip this soaking step.
Remove the core from cabbage, and finely shred. I use a Japanese-style mandoline for super angel-hair fine shreds, but a sharp knife and a sturdy cutting board works, too!
Place shredded cabbage, shredded cooked chicken, carrots, cilantro, and mint in a large bowl. Drain sliced red onions and add to bowl.
Drizzle with ¼ cup of dressing and toss until salad ingredients are well-combined and coated. Add more dressing 1 tablespoon at a time if needed.
Transfer to salad serving bowl and top with crushed roasted peanuts if using.
Pro Tips and Techniques for Chicken and Cabbage Salad
- Shred the cabbage as fine as possible. A mandoline or an extra wide vegetable peeler will make easy work of this.
- Use a combination of red and green cabbage. For the color and added nutrition boost from the red cabbage anthocyanins!
- Shred double the amount of cabbage. If you're gonna shred cabbage, you may as well shred the entire head all at once, use what you need for Chicken and Cabbage Salad, and save the rest as "meal prep." There are more recipes that use shredded cabbage, though after you've had this salad, you won't want anything else!
- Dress only the amount of salad you will serve and eat in one sitting. Leftover salad with dressing will be ok in the fridge for a day. After that, the dressed salad won't be bad, it will just soften and start to "pickle" in the lime-y, vinegar-y dressing.
Tools and Equipment
You don't technically need any special equipment to make this Chicken and Cabbage Salad. You can simply use a large knife and cutting board to shred all the cabbage and julienne the carrots. However, that doesn't mean there are a couple of gadgets and tools that might make this salad even easier to throw together than it already is.
- Japanese mandoline, for faster uniform slicing
- Regular mandoline with storage container
- Salad spinner is absolutely necessary for a house that eats a lot of salads because wet, soggy greens are the enemy of good salads.
- Glass mixing bowls that can also double as the serving bowl
- Chef's knife, my personal workhorse
- Wooden cutting board, oversized for all those radish cubes
- Vegetable peeler once I switched to this from the old-school swivel style, I never looked back
For the dressing, these tools are also helpful
- Citrus squeezer. You can squeeze citrus by hand, but my
cheapfrugalvalue-driven heart likes to squeeze out EVERY last nano-drop of juice - Garlic press.
- 2-ounce (4 tablespoons) liquid measuring cup
- Mini stainless steel whisk
- Small glass mason jars (8 ounces), get rid of those annoying 2-piece metal lids and use these air-tight lids
FAQ
Just your regular ol' round green cabbage, with the green, smooth leaves, is the one I use in this recipe. However, any type of cabbage—ruffly savoy, purple, even napa—works for this recipe.
All types of cabbage are "healthy," with about the same calories and fiber. But as far as which is the healthiest, red cabbage has more antioxidants in the form of anthocyanins, which is what gives it its color, and more vitamins A and C. Green cabbage offers more vitamin K than the others. A combination of both red and green will get you everything!
You can prep most of the components for this salad—shredded cabbage, cooked and shredded chicken, julienne carrots, and fish sauce vinaigrette—in advance, store them separately, and assemble just before serving. Fish Sauce Vinaigrette is highly recommended as an advance prep to be used for other recipes as well!
Best Chicken and Cabbage Salads You Must Try
I wasn't kidding when I said "think again!" if you thought there was nothing fresh in the fall/winter. In addition to this Kale White Bean Salad, try:
- LA-style Chinese Chicken Salad
- Mandarin Chicken Salad
- Emerald Kale Salad with Rotisserie Chicken, the Hillstone Dupe
- Kale and Chicken Salad with Roasted Peanut Viniagrette, Houston's Dupe
How to Eat More Cabbage
- Cabbage Apple Salad with Miso Mustard Dressing
- Roasted Cabbage with Gochujang Glaze
- Cabbage and Kale Slaw
- Green Cabbage Kimchi
Chicken and Cabbage Salad with Fish Sauce Vinaigrette
Ingredients
Salad Ingredients
- ½ medium red onion sliced lengthwise, paper-thin
- ½ head cabbage, to be shredded about 2½ pounds or 6 cups shredded
- 4-6 cups cooked chicken, boneless and skinless, shredded from 2 chicken breasts
- 1 carrot, to be julienned about 1 cup
- ¼ cup cilantro leaves
- ¼ cup mint leaves
- ½ cup chopped roasted peanuts, optional
Fish Sauce Vinaigrette
- 2 cloves garlic grated or very finely minced
- 1 1-inch piece ginger, grated
- 1-2 limes, juiced about ¼ cup juice
- ¼ cup apple cider or rice vinegar
- 2 tablespoons fish sauce
- 1 tablespoon maple syrup or equivalent sweetener plus more to taste
- 1 teaspoon minced jalapeño, serrano, or Thai bird chile, optional
Instructions
- Whisk or shake in a jar together minced garlic, grated ginger, lime juice, vinegar, fish sauce, maple syrup, and minced chile pepper if using.
- If you haven't already, slice red onion into paper-thin slices and soak in a small bowl of ice cold water for 10-15 minutes to soften the "bite" on raw onions while you prep the remaining ingredients. If you like the punch of raw onions, you can skip this soaking step.
- Remove the core from cabbage, and finely shred. I use a Japanese-style mandoline for super angel-hair fine shreds, but a sharp knife and a sturdy cutting board works, too!
- Place shredded cabbage, shredded cooked chicken, carrots, cilantro, and mint in a large bowl. Drain sliced red onions and add to bowl.
- Drizzle with ¼ cup of dressing and toss until salad ingredients are well-combined and coated. Add more dressing 1 tablespoon at a time if needed.
- Transfer to salad serving bowl and top with crushed roasted peanuts if using.
Notes
Nutrition
Food for Afterthoughts
Remember when we “dated” in college?
Exactly.
If you don’t remember dating in college because you were an MCB major, never showered, never plucked your eyebrows, never put on a smack of lipgloss, wore the same oversized hooded sweatshirt and Gap overalls everyday on an unchanging route from your apartment on Regent Street to the 4th floor of the undergraduate library and back again, well...that’s another post.
(I was Molecular Cell Bio only for the first two years, okay?!? I graduated with Economics!!)
But if you weren’t necessarily a complete loser/loner like me and don’t remember “dating” in college, the reason is that there was no such thing as “dating.” You were just “hanging out.”
Hanging Out vs Dating
Sure, when the [insert ethnicity here]-American Student Association’s spring formal came around, you took a “date,” but in regular, everyday college life, you didn’t go out on “a date,” and you certainly never went out on a series of dates. You weren’t “dating” your boyfriend. He just was...your boyfriend. Unless you were talking to your parents, of course, in which case he was your “peer tutor.”
You see, “dating” is something that we, as mature adults, do. Or rather, don’t do, but somewhere in that two years between college graduation and your real life, someone has brainwashed you into thinking that you’re supposed to be doing it. But it doesn’t exist. Dating is a figment of a marketing geniuses imagination. Dating is something that Dr. Neil Clark Warren, Match.com, and Tinder have fabricated. They created this idea of something that no one actually has or does, to make you feel like you’re missing out, but suddenly, they offer the best alternative to your nonexistent piece of it.
Jerks!
But brilliant, billion-dollar industry captain jerks.
So dating doesn’t really exist. What really happens is exactly what happens in college when you never called it dating to begin with. Only now you’re wearing cuter shoes. And you don’t have to worry about “privacy” from your nosy roommates.
Let's Study Together
You meet a guy.
He says, “We should study together!” Of course, unless you’re in some crazy PhD program now, or you’re on the 10-year track in college, he doesn’t say “study.” Probably says “We should go shopping together!” In which case, he’s gay, so ignore the rest of this post. He would realistically say something like “Let’s grab a cocktail at Happy Hour together!”
You are your ridiculously charming self over two cocktails at a place halfway between your offices. Chat. Laugh. You guys will do this again.
You do it again.
By the time you guys are taking turns every other night at each others’ apartments watching DVDs and ordering dinner in, you are “hanging out.” And you haven’t gone on a single date.
But then.
Yikes.
But then...
While you’re scraping the last of the bindhi masala from the takeout box onto your plate, he says “We should talk.”
You heard what he said, but you know he left out two words. You know that what he really meant to say was, “We should have the talk.”
*gulp*
Definitions
“The talk.” That dreaded four hours and forty-five-minute conversation that you wish you could have over IM, but this isn’t college anymore! The talk, which is commonly referred to by its scientific code name, The DTR, in which you and he recap the past month, or three weeks, or if you work really fast, two days; in which you and he admit out loud how you “feel” about each other *shudders*; in which you and he talk about...the future. Negotiations. Guidelines. Terms of Exclusivity and the Non-Disclosure Act. Define the Relationship. You have had these DTRs before in your (not)dating life. They always go well! But they have always been the beginning of...the end.
Your mouth is full of gobi aloo and before you can turn up the volume on Top Chef or change the subject, he has started down the road of the dreaded DTR.
You hash out the DTR. As usual, it’s refreshing. Or maybe that’s the Sauvignon Blanc you just chugged straight from the bottle.
It’s out there. On the table. Spoken. Your feelings are now official...and three days later, you just don’t like it anymore.
The DTR has stripped all the heart-a'flutter, mysterious, spontaneous fun out of “hanging out.”
Stew
Vietnamese beef stew is the aftermath of the DTR. Vietnamese beef stew has eradicated every delicious longing I’ve had for pho at Pho 99.
I hated pho. I hated Vietnamese food. But no sooner do I realize that “Hm, well, yeah, I guess pho is starting to grow on me since I’ve been ‘hanging out’ at Pho 99 more frequently than necessary,” and finally admit how I feel about the deliciously light, salty chicken and/or pork and/or beef broth, I taste something I hate, and I have to rethink ever “hanging out” at Pho 99 again.
Beef stew. I should have known. For God’s sake, it’s called "beef stew," and anything called beef stew, or comes in a pull top can, or looks strangely too much like beef, or all of the above, is going to be bad. The stew had promise because in the picture at the bottom of Pho 99’s very well-illustrated menu for people who don’t read Vietnamese, the stew appears to be dark red. As if it were going to burn the epithelium right off my esophagus on the way down. I like that.
The stew was spicy alright. It wasn’t spicy with "fire"; it was spicy, with a Christmas mix of cinnamon, cloves, and ass.
I hated it. The beef stew greasy, watery, strangely flavored with dissolved Gingerbread men, and the beef cubes looked like Alpo. Alpo, the deluxe version, that is, since they were pretty big chunks. There was something lost in the translation from Bo Kho Banh Mi Hoa Com to "dog food." I don't know where "beef stew" comes from in there.
Maybe I’m being too harsh. I can’t throw away all that time I spent at Pho 99. It was fun. Pho was fun.
Alright. *sigh* I'll give it a try. I can do this.
We're just never ordering beef stew again. And we do weeknights at my place.
jackt says
I love that Pho 99 place. It's so good. But my Vietnamese friend says it's not that good compared to the stuff in Little Saigon. What does he know. I bet he doesn't like PF Chang's either. PFFT. :)
sarah says
jackt: yes, all my friends who are true pho connoissuers laugh when i tell them i eat at pho 99, saying i haven't tried the "real stuff." still, for a noob like me, pho 99 will do.
onetomato says
i so get that. i HATE pho. i even hate the name. i don't like boiled beef, unless it's oxtail soup. i don't even like shabu shabu. and it smells funny. sorry for the rant.
Xericx says
ehhhh...i like vietnamese food...but still never really liked the versions of the assorted dishes at this place. Gotta go to Little Saigon for the real deal.
Its in westLA...which is all it really has going for it.....i actually usually order the rice dishes there, which are also not really spectacular...and the way you pay is just odd....dunno...paying at the front....+ they don't have a way to add the tip after on the credit card or something crazy like that.....an odd place.
sarah says
ometomato: please rant. this is a 24/7 all access backstage pass to your personal rant concert. rant away!
i think pho smells funny, too. but i still eat it. mostly it's the cilantro, which i pluck right out of the bowl and onto the tabletop if there's no small plate, and still, the broth smells funny. not "funny" haha. like, "funny," that's not what something i'm about to ingest should smell like. but i eat it anyway.
xericx: i have always noticed that the payment scheme is strange, too. friendly, smiling table service, but when it comes time for the check, they turn into the a&w in a mall food court. cash only for tip. hope they don't mind that the only cash i have is a dime and two pennies.
hermz says
Ya know, I went on a shopping date in December. Maybe that's what went wrong.
I just heard about a place that's supposedly good for pho (from a viet chica with an accent, so she must know her stuff) in the valley. Got plans check it out next week.
sarah says
hermz: shopping dates are not bad. it all depends on WHERE you are shopping. grocery store for ingredients to cook a romantic dinner together? good. sears auto parts? bad.
Anonymous says
a guy once told me "we should study together" because we were both taking calc. i didnt know what to think of course but all i did was i didnt talk to him after that. yes, im a nerd but i thought i deserved better.
when cold days come, i go down to the little chinese food off campus owned and operated by vietnamese people. and of course, eat pho once my senses crave for it. lol...