The type of chicken that Ina Garten never uses for her salads

Some people dismiss chicken salad as just a way to use up leftovers, but it's a dish in its own right: juicy chicken, a well-seasoned dressing, and a few carefully chosen ingredients. It can be served with crackers, nestled in an avocado, on toast, or straight from the bowl.

Ina Garten, known as the Barefoot Contessa, wouldn't make a boiled chicken for her salad. Before her time on the Food Network, she ran a gourmet food store in the Hamptons and later wrote cookbooks. In all her chicken salad recipes, she uses bone-in roasted chicken breast.

Roast the chicken with the skin on and then debone it for the salad, because this retains moisture and flavor, something you don't get when boiling it. According to Epicurious, roasting chicken gives it more flavor and is also easier: all you need is a baking tray for the breasts. Boiling or poaching it leaves pots of hot water and causes much of the flavor to be lost.

Her recipes include a wide variety of ingredients: from the mayonnaise, sliced ​​green grapes, and fresh tarragon in the Veronique chicken salad, to the pecans and toasted walnuts in the Contessa chicken salad. From chopped celery and pickled gherkins to poppy seeds and apples in the Waldorf salad, anything goes, as long as the chicken is roasted.