Kale potato salad
A side dish that doesn’t need a main event
The blooming and greening of spring is lovely, but you can’t eat it. The corn is ankle-high, the peaches leave a lot to the imagination, and many farmers and gardeners have barely planted out their tomatoes. But you can always eat Kale Potato Salad.
This salad is so transformative that even teenagers ask for it. I know a young woman who requested it for her graduation party. The combination of rosemary, celery seed and thyme in the vinaigrette evokes the flavor of marinated artichokes. Each component of the salad, including kale leaf and stem, cheddar cheese chunk and potato, holds the dressing differently. It’s a side dish that doesn’t need a main event.
Kale is an early-season producer, and freezes well too. The fall harvest is the sweetest and most abundant of the year, and I like to freeze a big stash to eat through winter and spring. This time of year I make it with either fresh or frozen kale.
It’s a template as much of a recipe, a style of potato salad. You can make it with as much or as little kale as you want, cook the kale much or little as you wish, chop it as small as you care to, and even substitute other fibrous greens like dandelion or collards. You can even add crispy bits of bacon.
But incredibly, one ingredient the recipe does not call for is mayo. I may be worldly in some ways, but I’m very provincial when it comes to both potato salad and mayonnaise. Potato salad needs mayo, and mayo needs to go on everything. But there is a long tradition, most famously in France but elsewhere too, of naked, mayofree potato salad. And I must admit, Kale Potato Salad has made me question some of my most deeply held beliefs.