San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Apples in potato salad surprise, polarize
No two Puerto Rican potato salads are the same. Food blogger Reina Gascon-Lopez says her family likes to keep it fairly simple with mostly just eggs, mayo and roasted red peppers. Food writer and video host Alejandra Ramos says her mom’s version would include carrots, onion, lime juice and sliced pimiento-stuffed green olives or capers.
For my colleague Daniela Galarza, the version her mom learned from Galarza’s paternal grandmother would include stuffed olives, onion, cilantro, lemon juice, red bell pepper, and both sour cream and mayo. (“I forgot! Green peas!” Daniela’s mother calls her to add.) And food blogger Marta Rivera Diaz says she likes to include sofrito for an extra dose of flavor to the recipe she learned from her mother.
Recipes for the dish vary from family to family, and different preferences sometimes arise even among members of households. The oft-included ingredient that creates the most division? Apples.
“You have two very polarizing camps: They either really dislike it and they hate it, or they just
think it’s the most genius thing they’ve ever tasted,” Rivera Diaz says.
When peeled and diced to a similar size, apples blend in with the potatoes and can startle the unsuspecting.
“I distinctly remember the very first time I had our potato salad when my mom made it, and I was so angry at her. I was like, ‘Why are you putting apples in the potato salad? What’s
wrong with you?’ ” Rivera Diaz says. “I just remember being so grossed out by the sweet and savory of it all,” though she has since changed her stance.
For Ramos, it’s the texture that throws her off. “I’m always sort of poking at the cube in the bowl and testing out the texture, looking for the tender potato texture versus the crisp apple. But occasionally I miss it, and it’s in my mouth and I’m like,
‘Oh no! What do I do?! What do I do?!’ ” Ramos says. “It became a kind of joke, because my mom knows that we don’t like the apples. When you look at our plates as we’re eating, it’s this little pile of discarded apples that have been pushed to the side.”
When a friend served me a version including apples, I was surprised, too; it was certainly a shock to my taste buds, but I enjoyed the sweet-savory combination and the interplay of textures.
“When I make a Puerto Rican potato salad, I always stare at people who are having it for the first time to wait for them to take that bite,” Rivera Diaz says.
Ramos prefers to give people a heads-up to help eliminate the “dissonance in their heads between what they were expecting and what they’re tasting” and give them a better shot at liking the dish.
“The first time my husband tried my mother’s potato salad, I warned him because I love him,” Ramos says with a laugh.
But how did Puerto Rican potato salad come to be? Potatoes and apples aren’t typically part of the island’s cuisine. “It’s one of those Puerto Rican dishes that veers away from what you typically think of as Puerto Rican food,” Ramos says. “It feels like it has very mainland American influences in it.”
The dish isn’t too dissimilar from Southern-style mayo-based potato salad or Waldorf salad. So perhaps when foods were imported from the mainland, so were some of its recipes, and residents of the unincorporated U.S. territory fused the two and added some Puerto Rican sabor (flavor) to make it their own.