This is a tortilla-wrapped salad with crispy chicken, Romaine lettuce, and a whole bunch of crunchy bits paired with citrusy mandarin orange slices and a sweet and tangy dressing. It’s a salad that you can hold in one hand—the perfect way to eat salad, some people (me) might say.
What is this salad/wrap called, you might ask? That’s a good question. The base of this wrap is a salad that you’ve probably seen on restaurant menus listed as Asian salad (or sometimes Chinese chicken salad or even Oriental chicken salad).
Skip to ingredients:
I spent a little time writing about the history behind this salad/wrap and put a bit of effort into the salad naming convention in this blog post. If you want to skip all of that to read about the ingredients.
Or you can go right to the recipe.
History and problems with the Asian salad name
There’s a lot more to the history of Asian salad than I expected when I started writing about this salad-turned-wrap. Because of this, you might notice that Wikipedia goes deeper into the background of this salad than it does for a lot of common culinary dishes.
A woman named Sylvia Cheng Wu, from Santa Monica, California, is credited for inventing or popularizing the Chinese chicken salad in the 1960s. It is said that she first made a version of this salad for Cary Grant, an English-born American movie star, who frequented her restaurant, Madame Wu’s Garden.
Around 20 years later Austrian celebrity chef and restaurateur, Wolfgang Puck, created a version of a salad that was similar to Madame Wu’s Chinese chicken salad and added it to the menu at his Chinese/American fusion restaurant called Chinois on Main. That salad has remained on the menu as “Chinois chicken salad” since 1983. The word Chinois directly translates to the word Chinese in the English language.
At some point the word Asian became more commonly used than Chinese to refer to this style of salad even appearing on Wendy’s menu as “Asian Cashew Chicken Salad.” Asian salads appear on many restaurant menus and there are some restaurants, like Applebee’s, that refer to them as “Oriental Chicken Salad.“
As a child in the 1980s, it was explained to me that the word Oriental could refer to objects but we should not use it to refer to people. A salad is an object and not a person, but its use as a salad naming convention still seems overarching. Even though there are people who refer to themselves as Oriental and have very few problems with the word, it seems to me like a word that attempts to simplify and group large diverse ethnicities and cultures together into one pot.
The word Asian—which refers to about 30% of the world’s landmass—also seems weird to represent a culinary dish. It’s a lot like if we called something a “European Sandwich” and expected everyone to know exactly what cultures across the continent this sandwich was supposed to refer to.
“Calling something Asian doesn’t describe anything and it requires a lot of assumptions because most people would be surprised if they ordered an Asian salad and got something that was full of Indian spices or Filipino flavors, even though those cultures are in Asia. It’s collapsing so many diverse cultures into one word.”
Preeti Mistry, chef and co-author of “Juhu Beach Club Cookbook”
That quote above is from an article on Consumer Reports called “Stop Calling It Asian Salad” from 2022. It’s a pretty good read if you’re at all interested. The long and the short of it seems to be that this salad was born with the name of Chinese salad, invented in the United States and it does not encompass all of the myriad of flavors from all of the cultures of Asia.
Because of all of this and because this salad was created in the United States based on a couple of additions of ingredients that originated from the continent of Asia, I think I will just be dropping any indication of Chinese, Asian, or Oriental in the naming of my wrap recipe. It still will taste the same, I’m just going to name it based on the flavors and textures involved.
What is in this salad?
According to a website dedicated to the inventor of this Chinese chicken salad, Madame Wu, the original salad from the 1960s contained, “a blend of shredded chicken, fried vermicelli, green onions, and toasted almonds.”
The wrap I’m writing about today is based on my mom’s salad recipe. My mom created a family recipe cookbook in the early 2000s to share with family and friends and she was planning to add this salad recipe to it. It was listed in her handwritten recipes as Asian chicken salad. During the editing and proofing process, my sister brought up that it wasn’t very Asian, so my mom renamed it.
My mom’s version of the salad is an iceberg and Romaine lettuce-based salad that has sliced green onions, crunchy sugared, slivered almonds, Mandarin oranges, and celery with a sweet and slightly tangy dressing.
Most versions of this salad will also include chicken of some sort, pieces of fried wonton, dried ramen noodles, or fried chow mein noodles to bring extra crunch and the dressing often might include ingredients like soy sauce, sesame oil, or fresh ginger.
My wife and I make a version of this recipe a couple of times a year and have been a big fan of it in salad format so I figured a few years ago that it might be even better wrapped in a tortilla. And in my opinion, it is. My wife still prefers it as a salad, but the beautiful thing about this recipe (or any lettuce-based wrap) is that you can gather all the ingredients together and some people can serve themselves a salad while others wrap all the ingredients up in a lightly warmed tortilla.
The full recipe for this salad is right here and also the instructions and full recipe for the wrap are near the bottom of this blog post.
Mom's mandarin orange and romaine toss
A fun crunchy, crispy salad with a sweet and tangy dressing and citrusy freshness. Add bite-sized pieces of fried, grilled, or rotisserie chicken to bring everything together.
Get RecipeWe’re going to turn this salad into a wrap so we need something to wrap around the salad.
The big tortilla
It’s typically at this point in my sandwich blog posts where I write about the bread that I’ve made for this handheld or sandwich. That’s not the case this week. I didn’t make the tortillas that I used for these wraps.
Making flour tortillas isn’t hard, but making them really thin and also really large and mostly round is difficult. I like to buy the really large 13-inch sized tortillas when I make wraps but I am aware that these aren’t always easy to find. You can definitely make this same recipe with the 10-inch burrito tortillas that most grocery stores stock.
The differences in the amount of filling you can cram in a 10-inch vs 13-inch tortilla is a lot but for me, my rule of thumb for filling a wrap is to pretend the tortilla is a plate and make a salad that would comfortably fit that plate. A lot of this is a big guess but the worst thing that can happen is that you make too much salad and you just have to eat a little bit with a fork.
Three most important ingredients
If you don’t count the dressing or the protein (in this case chicken) there are three ingredients that I think are crucial to the composition of this sandwich and/or wrap.
Canned mandarin oranges
Mandarin oranges happen to actually be Asian in origin. These extra-sweet oranges originate in subtropical areas in Asia like the Philippines or China.
The canned versions of these fruits are packed in a light syrup which brings a big amount of sweetness to the salad that works well alongside the dressing. You can also add a couple of tablespoons of the light syrup to the dressing and remove some of the sugar if you want.
Chow mein noodles
Store-bought chow mein noodles are an easy way to add extra crunch to this wrap. For this matter, they’re an easy way to add crunch to any salad or sandwich. If you can’t find chow mein noodles you can also use dried ramen noodles (just buy one of the cheap packets and break up the noodles to sprinkle on) or you might be able to find fried wonton strips in some grocery stores. The goal of all three of these options should be to provide a big crunch to the salad/wrap that makes it more fun to eat.
Sugared slivered almonds
You can buy pre-candied almonds, but those are typically very hard and crunchy. The beauty of these almonds is the fact that they require pre-slivered almonds that you then coat with a bit of sugar to make them slightly more crunchy but since they’re thin, they aren’t too crunchy to overwhelm a bite of the salad.
It takes less than 10 minutes in a warm pan to get these slivered almonds coated in sugar and I think it’s worth the effort for the crunchy, sweet textural experience that it adds to the wrap.
The full ingredient list (there are two) and recipe instructions for making these almonds are in the full salad recipe above and the wrap recipe below.
Chicken options
For these wraps, I made two different types of chicken tenders, but you really can make this salad with any sort of chicken. Grilled chicken and rotisserie chicken are two fairly easy options that work really well here.
Oven-baked “fried” chicken tenders
I used both oven-baked tenders and fried tenders (as you’ll see soon) in these salad wraps. These baked tenders are something that my wife and I make a few times a year when we’re looking for something easy but still fun to eat.
Just because they are baked in the oven instead of fried submerged in oil doesn’t make these super healthy because they’re still coated in kettle-style potato chips which give them their “almost fried” crunch.
Another key ingredient in this recipe is paprika which lends a bit of color to the final chicken pieces. In the United States, our paprika (not the smoked kind) is lightly flavored and it is often used to provide a light boost of brownish-red color to fried food. It works well in baked “fried” food as well.
Oven "fried" crispy chicken tenders
These crispy, flavorful chicken tenders will trick you into thinking they were deep fried. You can choose your choice of potato chip flavor, but salt and vinegar is my favorite. The key is to make sure you have kettle-style chips.
Get RecipeDeep-fried chicken tenders
No matter how good my oven-baked tenders are, these are better. There’s quite a bit more cleanup and mess involved, but fried chicken tenders are always going to be better than baked ones. I sort of see fried chicken tenders as a weekend meal and the baked versions as a weeknight meal since the cleanup is a lot less.
Chicken tenders are very commonly seen in chicken salad wraps, so this is what I used for most of the wraps I made during testing, but I have made this wrap with no-chicken, grilled chicken, and rotisserie chicken and they all work great.
I wrote the recipe with a “choose-your-own-chicken” method where I expect the recipe reader to select the preparation of chicken that they would like to use. They all work.
Here’s my buttermilk chicken tender recipe that is well-tested and much appreciated in my house, but as I have said, it’s not necessarily the only way you should prepare chicken for this salad or wrap.
Buttermilk fried chicken tenders
A quick and easy recipe for homemade fried chicken tenders. Perfect for dipping into your favorite honey mustard or barbecue sauce.
Get RecipeThe sweet and savory dressing
This is a simple savory and sweet dressing that has a little bit of tang from vinegar and hot sauce. My version of this dressing is slightly different than my mom’s recipe. My mom is very vague in her mentioning of vinegar but my wife and I typically use rice wine vinegar. I also added soy sauce and I used sriracha in place of the hot sauce that her original recipe suggests.
This dressing, like many dressings, is easiest to make directly in the mason jar that you will use for storing it in the fridge. Basically, you add all the ingredients to the jar, seal it up, and shake to combine and turn the individual ingredients into an incorporated dressing. The dressing recipe is in both the salad recipe above and the wrap recipe below.
Make the salad
The easiest way to build this wrap is to make the salad in a bowl, dress the salad, and then add the dressed salad onto a tortilla for wrapping. Remember the rule of thumb—that I live by—is to pretend that your tortilla is a plate and we’re making a salad based on comfortably filling that tortilla plate.
Once the salad is made, taste a piece of Romaine to make sure everything is dressed properly and get ready to wrap the whole salad in tortilla.
Warm the tortilla
Warming the tortilla is important in making a wrap like this. Even though this is a cold salad, the process of warming the tortilla isn’t actually to warm things up, it’s to help the tortilla become more pliable so that the wrapping process works without breaking the flatbread.
The easiest way to warm a tortilla is in the microwave. You just need to place one on a plate and I typically will take a lightly dampened paper towel to cover the tortilla and microwave it for 20 seconds or so. This is long enough to warm the tortilla up so that it is floppy and will have the best chance of not breaking during the folding process.
Another way to fairly easily warm a tortilla is right in a dry skillet, pan, or griddle over low heat. You only need to warm the tortilla in order to get it ready for wrapping so a minute or so per side works perfectly in my experience.
Wrapping it up
If you’ve ever wrapped a burrito, this is the exact same process. Basically, you should get a pile of the wrap fillings on the bottom half of the warmed tortilla (the half closest to you). Then you fold both the left and right sides toward the center and holding those sides folded in, start carefully rolling from the bottom to the top.
Here’s a slide show that should help if my instructions aren’t very clear. Basically, make sure your tortilla is pliable and take your time and you should be able to get things wrapped up.
Build and toss all of the salad ingredients and place them in the bottom half (closest to you) of the tortilla. 
Fold in both of the sides. 
Keeping both sides folded in, roll over the bottom of the tortilla over the pile of salad. 
After rolling the tortilla over the pile of salad, try to keep things tightly wrapped and keep rolling. 
The key to wrapping is to make sure the sides stay tightly folded over. 
Slice the wrap and serve.
Worst case scenario is that you are unable to get a full burrito wrap but you can still just fold or roll the tortilla around the salad and eat it that way.
Crispy, crunchy, citrusy chicken wrap photos and recipe
This is a good one and it makes you feel healthy because you’re eating a salad. Remember, this is just a healthy salad and if you eat two or three it makes you extra healthy. Subscribe to this blog for more health and salad tips.
Crispy, crunchy, citrusy chicken wrap
This wrap brings the excitement of a crunchy, crispy salad with a sweet and tangy dressing and citrusy freshness into handheld form. Note: this wrap works well with fried, grilled, or rotisserie chicken (or with no chicken).
Ingredients:
Sweet and tangy dressing- 1⁄3 cup vegetable oil
- 2 tablespoons rice wine vinegar
- 2 tablespoons granulated sugar
- 1 tablespoon fresh parsley, minced
- 2 teaspoons soy sauce
- 1⁄2 teaspoon sriracha hot sauce
- 1⁄2 teaspoon salt
- 1⁄8 teaspoon ground black pepper
- 1⁄4 cup slivered almonds
- 1⁄4 cup granulated sugar
- 1 head of romaine lettuce, thinly sliced
- 2 green onions, thinly sliced
- 4 to 6 ounces bite-sized grilled chicken (or fried chicken tenders, or rotisserie chicken—split between 2 wraps)
- 6 to 8 slices of canned mandarin oranges, drained
- handful of sugared almonds (from above)
- chow mein noodles
- sweet and tangy dressing (from above)
- 1 burrito sized flour tortilla (10 to 13 inch sizes)
Directions:
Dressing: add all dressing ingredients to a jar or bowl with a lid. Once they're all in the container, shake well to combine and store in the refrigerator for up to two weeks. Shake well before using.
Sugared almonds: add the sugar and almonds to a large skillet or pan over medium-low heat. Stir often and keep a close eye on the sugar. Once it starts to moisten in the pan, make sure to keep stirring to get the melty bits of sugar to coat the almonds.
Cook, stirring frequently until there are no visible granules of sugar in the bottom of the pan. This means the sugar should have fully started to adhere to the almonds.
Allow the almonds to cool on a paper towel or plate and then store them in a sealed container on the counter for a couple of weeks.
Chicken directions: this particular salad works well with any sort of chicken. You can use grilled, fried, or even rotisserie chicken pieces, just cut it into bite sizes to make the salad easy to eat. Here are instructions for grilling chicken but I also have recipes for buttermilk fried chicken tenders that work well in this salad.
Salad assembly: first we need to make the salad that we will wrap in tortillas. Add thinly sliced Romaine lettuce and green onion to a large bowl and top with chicken, mandarine oranges, sugared almonds, and chow mein noodles. Toss everything to combine.
Add a few tablespoons of dressing to the bowl with the salad and mix everything up so that everything has been coated by the dressing.
Warm the tortillas: in the microwave or in a large pan over medium-low heat, warm a tortilla so that it will be more flexible and wrap without breaking. If you want to use the microwave, place the tortilla on a large plate topped with a lightly damp paper towel. Microwave for 20 seconds to warm the tortilla. If you choose to use a pan on the stove, place the pan on medium-low heat and warm each tortilla for 30 to 45 seconds per side.
Wrapping process: add half of the salad from the large bowl into the lower half of each tortilla. Fold in the sides and then wrap from the full side of the tortilla to the empty side, making sure that both sides stay tucked in. Once the tortilla is fully wrapped around the salad, make sure the whole thing stays seam side down so that it doesn't unravel. Slice the wrap and serve.
Check back next week
Next week we will not be making any more salads. Maybe it’ll even be a burger?
