Limey, tangy chicken and herb salad with nuoc cham
It starts with a rotisserie chicken, because we’d never ask you to roast a chicken in this heat.
Cooking
June 26, 2025
Two beige dishes containing a vibrant, herb-flecked chicken salad sit on a cream-color countertop.
Yewande Komolafe’s chicken and herb salad with nuoc cham. Linda Xiao for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Monica Pierini,

Don’t roast. Rotisserie.

By Mia Leimkuhler

Each season has a chicken. Fall’s chicken is soupy and stewy; winter’s is a festive roast bird. Spring’s chicken, if not seared in a skillet and scattered with herbs, is fried (for picnics under the flowering trees, naturally).

Summer? Summer’s chicken is a rotisserie chicken.

Pick it up on that Costco run for sunscreen and pool noodles. If your farmers’ market has one of those portable rotisseries with the golden birds spinning above a trough of potatoes, those are your summer chickens. Could summer’s chicken be grilled? Absolutely. But I don’t have a grill, and open flames lose their appeal when the sun is already blazing.

So let’s all pick up a summer — sorry, rotisserie — chicken to make Yewande Komolafe’s chicken and herb salad with nuoc cham, a happy jumble of chicken, cabbage, crunchy vegetables and leafy herbs in an assertively zippy dressing. It’s a star of our no-cook collection, a compilation of recipes that don’t require any stove or oven action.

If you’re new to nuoc cham, you’re in for a treat: It’s a lip-smacking, salty-sour-sweet mix of garlic, chile, sugar, lime juice and fish sauce. And if you know (and thus love) the charms of nuoc cham, you know that keeping a jar in your fridge is a pro move, so that you’re not only set for Yewande’s salad, but for any number of quick, healthy, summery meals.

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Chicken and Herb Salad With Nuoc Cham

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And before you go

In the interest of showing, not telling — and of riding out this heat wave refreshed and thirst-quenched — here’s Kasia Pilat making her pickle lemonade:

A still image from a video shows a hand stirring a glass of pickle lemonade with a pickle spear.
Sweet, sour, tangy, perfect. Natasha Janardan/The New York Times

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