Chicken Bowtie Pasta Salad

In this post, we’ll show you how to make Chicken Bowtie Pasta Salad. This creamy, crunchy, and hearty salad is perfect for a side dish or light meal. It’s colorful and contains grapes, pineapple, mandarin oranges, dried cranberries, red onion, cubed chicken, and more!

Ingredients

Before starting this recipe, you’ll want to verify that you have the following ingredients:

Bowtie pasta – provides a cute shape, but you can use another shape if you’d prefer.

Chicken – We cooked our white meat chicken in the skillet with 1 tablespoon of oil, salt, and pepper.

Salt & pepper – To flavor the white meat chicken.

Oil – We used olive oil to cook the chicken.

Celery – provides a nice crunch.

Red onion – balances the sweet flavors.

Mandarin oranges – (canned); drained. Provides texture and sweetness

Pineapple – (canned); drained. Provides texture and sweetness

Red grapes – halved, provides texture and sweetness

Coleslaw dressing – sweet, and tangy to bind all the ingredients and create a creamy texture. We used the Marie’s brand.

Green onion – garnish

Dried cranberries – garnish

Pecans – crunchy garnish

Equipment and Supplies Needed

We used the following equipment and supplies to make this recipe. Items that are optional or can be substituted will be noted.

• chef knife – to chop veggies, and fruit.
• cutting board – for chopping veggies, and slicing fruit/chicken.
• 6-quart stockpot – for cooking pasta
• colander – for straining pasta, or cleaning fruit.
• large skillet – to cook chicken.
• tongs – for cooking chicken.
• mixing bowl – for mixing salad together
• wooden spoon – to use for mixing the salad.
• storage container – for any leftovers

Recipe Tips

This recipe is easy to make if you know the right tips and tricks! Here are my tips for ensuring your dish comes out perfectly.

Chicken

I order to get the most flavor out of the chicken, pan fry it. Slice 1 large white meat chicken cutlet lengthwise into 3 pieces for quicker cooking. Season each side with salt & pepper before adding it to the skillet.

This method reduces cooking time drastically with each side taking only about 3 minutes. When done, the outer chicken will be seared and golden brown, and the inner chicken will be moist, and juicy.

The internal temperature of your chicken meat should read 165 degrees F. This is considered the safe temperature to consume chicken.

Rotisserie chicken is a lovely option as well. Simply remove any white or dark meat (minus the skin and bones) from your chicken. Once you have 2 cups of meat, you are good to go!

Dressing

For this recipe, we used 12 ounces of bottle coleslaw dressing. However, you can also mix things up by using poppy seeds dressing. This will lighten the sugar content and make the salad a tad less creamy.

Toppings

We decided on dried cranberries and pecans to garnish our salad because that is what we had on-hand. However, slivered almonds or chopped walnuts would be a great alternative. These Candied Walnuts would also be amazing and take only 5 minutes to prepare. Additionally, you can swap the dried cranberries for golden raisins.

Storage

If you want to store your Chicken Bowtie Pasta Salad in the refrigerator, just follow these easy steps.

• Scoop any leftovers into a large container with an airtight lid. This will last up to 5 days for best flavor in the refrigerator. It unfortunately does NOT freeze well.
• Be sure to mix the salad before serving to evenly coat the dressing. You may also want to add additional dried cranberries, or chopped pecans to the top to freshen it up.

Recipe

Follow the recipe below to make Chicken Bowtie Pasta Salad! This recipe makes 16 servings, but you can adjust the recipe card for other serving sizes.