Six tasty potato salad recipes for the Fourth
Zesty potato salad is at once a new and classic side — here are six recipes ripe for the home cook’s own interpretation
THE late great food writer Laurie Colwin once wrote — correctly — that there really isn’t such a thing as bad potato salad.
“So long as the potatoes are not undercooked, it all tastes pretty good to me,” she wrote in “Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen.” “Some potato salads are sublime, some are miraculous and some merely ordinary, but I have yet to taste any that was awful.”
Nor I. And I’ve had a lot of potato salad. You might say my family’s glue is a creamy spackle of potatoes, egg and mayo. Every household in my sprawling family has its own defining potato salad nuances: white onion or green onion (or none at all); sweet or sour pickles; mustard or no; real mayonnaise or Miracle Whip. But at their tasty heart, they were essentially the same — a comforting, familiar mash-up that required no special trip to the supermarket since the ingredients were always at hand.
Despite its ubiquity, I still equate potato salad with special occasions since it attends so many — birthday or funeral, anniversary or baptism, graduation or going-away party. It was always at every picnic or barbecue, too, especially on the Fourth of July. I didn’t grow up in the South, but I have lived long enough in Texas to appreciate the potato salad’s pull. (Especially when it involves Duke’s or Blue Plate
mayonnaises, magic emulsions that I now can’t live without.)
“Potato salad is filling, cooling and full of texture — all of which make for the perfect companion to any dish off the grill,” said Robby Melvin, test-kitchen director for Southern Living. “I’ve always thought of potato salad as the ultimate ‘everything bite’: tender creamy potatoes, tangy and smooth Duke’s to bind, crunchy celery and scallions, herbs, eggs and more. It’s perfect.”
And perfectly adaptable. “Potato salad is pretty much a blank canvas,” said Debbie Moose, author of “Potato Salad: 65 Recipes From Classic to Cool.” “Don’t be afraid to really punch some flavor. Flavor it up!”
In her extensive potato salad research, Moose found that the blank canvas can accommodate all types of flavors — Greek influences with olives and feta; Southern twang with pimento cheese; steakhouse style with blue cheese; Italian leanings with pesto — as well as grilled potatoes and even sweet potatoes.
“With potato salad,” Moose said, “go big or go home.”
Or go classic, which appeals to a wide swath of potato salad fans. Even before he opened The Pit Room, a Houston barbecue joint, co-owner Michael Sambrooks knew he had to have a potato salad worthy of his craft smoked meats. His grandmother’s recipe, which he tweaked for the restaurant, is a mustardy, mashy-textured potato salad larded with pickled bell peppers and sweated-down celery and shallots that packs plenty of flavor.
Sambrooks and his business partner, chef/ pitmaster Bramwell Tripp, say having stellar sides is important. And according to Sambrooks, the Pit Room’s potato salad — which is available for bulk order for parties and picnics — is one of those foods that elicits an emotional response from customers. Tripp agreed. “It evokes memories, and people tend to like that,” he said.
And in the South, those are powerful memories. “There is something about just doing the classic, well, classically,” Melvin said. “I’ve rarely tasted an interpretation of potato salad or beans that was as impressive as a well-executed, old-school Southern version. It’s my belief that the pressure is on the cook, not the potato salad.”
So get cracking, potato salad lovers. Let potato salad freedom ring.
And, keep in mind this delicious bit of advice from Colwin:
“It is always wise to make too much potato salad. Even if you are cooking for two, make enough for five,” she wrote. “Potato salad improves with age — that is, if you are lucky enough to have any left over.”