Making shredded chicken

There are a lot of reasons why you might want to make shredded chicken. It is a great stuffing for tacos and burritos, can be used as a salad topping, added to soup, quesadilla filling - once you start thinking about how you can use shredded chicken, you can come up with a ton of uses.

My personal use case arose because I was getting hooked on tuna salad. As a cheap, convenient lunch, tuna salad is excellent. Can of tuna, dollop of mayonnaise, spoonful of pickle relish and boom: lunch is served. But once I got to the point of eating this every day for lunch for a week, I started to wonder about the mercury content. It turns out that healthy adults should not eat canned tuna more than once a week due to the mercury risk. Um, thanks but no thanks!

My first experiments in making chicken salad were an abject failure. I basically ended up eating chunks of cold chicken dressed with mayonnaise. Not the greatest lunch in the world. (Although not the worst, either.) On the up side, I really like being able to cook up a whole lot of plain meat once a week, pop it in the fridge, and pull out whatever I need throughout the rest of the work week.

It turns out that the key to getting nicely shredded chicken is to choose boneless skinless chicken breasts, and to basically steam them. When you steam the breasts, they soften and become easy to fork apart into shreds. Steaming also ensures that the chicken will not end up too dry. Although depending on how you plan to use it, you may need to drain the shredded meat before storing it, so that it's not too wet.

There are two easy methods of creating shredded chicken: in a slow cooker (4-5 hours) or on the stovetop in a lidded skillet (10-15 minutes). Mel's Kitchen Café explains both methods in all the detail you need, and also offers a collection of recipes for that delicious shredded meat. Yum!

Image courtesy Flickr/www.WorthTheWhisk.com