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I love a good potato salad with everything….alond with a sandwich,chicken,with the barbecue, or just simply as a snack. Everyone has their own recipe and so do the supermarkets…my mom’s sister always made her special potato salad with apples everytime we came for a visit…so what are your waiting for? Start boiling those potatoes!
This article titled “How to make perfect potato salad” was written by Felicity Cloake, for The Guardian on Wednesday 18th April 2012 23.10 UTC
We British love a picnic. The first ray of sunshine carpets parks, verges and even kerbs with al fresco diners, happily cramming in scotch eggs and pork pies like they’re going out of fashion – because, although in theory you can decant anything you like on to your tartan rug, our climate dictates that the sustenance in question should be relatively hearty.
Quiches, sticky sausages, Dundee cake; perhaps a few carrot batons or cherry tomatoes as a concession to health, but in general, the British picnic on foodstuffs that, along with a fiery glug of ginger beer or a warming glass of cider, offer some protection against a “fresh” breeze or the occasional spot of rain.
Potato salad, then has some claim to being the supreme example, the appending of the word “salad” giving it a summery, if not particularly healthy air, and the hearty combination of carbohydrate and mayonnaise suggesting valuable insulating properties. It also happens to go very well with other picnic staples, like cold salmon or ham sandwiches. Yotam Ottolenghi may do a mean grilled courgette and fennel with saffron crumbs, but as my granny would have said, it won’t put hairs on your chest.
Waxy v floury
The eternal question with any potato recipe, this is one of the few dishes in which the British embrace the waxy potato with as much enthusiasm as our continental neighbours. Nigel Slater, writing in Tender, suggests that they aren’t the only option however: “The other approach is to use a floury King Edward-style potato, boiled till its edges fray, then cut into crumbling slices … it provides a salad of hearty rusticity”. I see what he means, but I don’t like the way the King Edwards fall apart when I toss them with the dressing, creating a mayonnaisey, potatoey mush instead of anything that could kindly be described as a salad, rustic or otherwise. Waxy it is – particularly given the quality of the new potatoes at this time of year.
Peel appeal
Most recipes call for one to peel the potatoes, generally after cooking but Nigel again offers a rare voice of dissent. “I like the rusticity of an unskinned potato salad,” he admits, “but there is also something very elegant about a salad made from skinned new potatoes”. Having burned my fingers trying to peel potatoes straight from the pan once too often, I struggle to see the elegance, but more importantly, I think that potato skins add both texture and flavour to the dish – without them, it could almost be anything lurking beneath the mayonnaise. If you do leave them on, however, it’s important to make sure there’s enough skinned surface area to absorb the dressing, which means choosing slightly larger potatoes, and cutting them into halves or quarters.
Dressing up, dressing down
Some of you may well think that, if one is stupid enough to try and peel hot potatoes, minor burns are no more than just desserts – in which case I refer you to Constance Spry’s observation, in her nigh legendary Cookery Book, that it is of prime importance that “the dressing should be poured over the cooked potatoes while these are still hot in order that it may penetrate into the slices”. This is certainly true: most of the vinaigrette added to cold cooked potatoes runs off, and ends up in the bottom of the bowl.
What kind of dressing to use, however, is less clear. Jane Grigson’s Vegetable Book suggests that it must be “well-flavoured”, suggesting white wine or vinaigrette. Constance Spry, the Riverford Farm Cook Book, and the Prawn Cocktail Years all plump for the latter, and I can see why – wine just isn’t acidic enough here: the bland, almost buttery flavour of a new potato needs something sharper. Riverford Farm uses a simple oil and vinegar mixture, but adding a little mustard, as Simon Hopkinson and Lindsey Bareham do, gives a nice little kick.
Mayonnaise
Some recipes, like that in the Prawn Cocktail Years, just stop there – allow the potatoes to cool in their dressing, garnish with a few herbs, and tuck in. (“Although it can be fine to use mayonnaise,” the authors admit, somewhat grudgingly, “its thickness smears rather than coats the potato”.) Most, however, add a second dressing, once the potatoes have cooled down. Jane Grigson suggests a simple mayonnaise, Riverford Farm use a combination of mayo, crème fraîche and Greek yoghurt, which I find a little too sour, and Constance Spry deploys what she calls a “coleslaw dressing”, which involves boiling together vinegar, mustard, salt, flour and sugar, beating in eggs and butter, and then finishing off with cream. The result reminds me, not entirely pleasurably, of supermarket coleslaw – sweet and vinegary and oddly cloying. A simple mayonnaise seems by far the best option. If it ain’t broke …
Some recipes skip the vinaigrette stage altogether, and head straight for the mayonnaise – both Sarah Raven and Signe Johansen allow their spuds to drain for 15 minutes, and then toss them in a thick dressing. The former uses mayonnaise, enlivened with garlic and mustard powder, the latter goes for an unholy marriage of sour cream and salad cream. Given the dish is billed, in Signe’s hitherto faultless Scandilicious book, as a “pepped-up version of a traditional Scandinavian dill, egg and potato salad”, I’m prepared to allow the salad cream as an ingredient whose charms have been lost in translation – because, even in such tiny quantities (1 tbsp to 200ml sour cream), it brings back hideous memories of wet, limp iceberg and other school dinner horrors. (The recipe also leaves me a bottle looking for a good home, if anyone’s interested?) In both cases however, I feel the lack of tangy vinaigrette – without it, the potatoes and dressing remain in two separate layers.
Additions: a fishy caper
Alliums are a popular addition to potato salads – as Jane Grigson notes, this is “not a ladylike dish: it should have a direct appeal, from the delicate earthiness that characterises good potatoes and the sweet fire of a good onion”. I find her raw Spanish onion too much of a good thing however (cuddling up for warmth loses some of its appeal when you have to keep apologising for your lunch choices), and the same goes for Sarah Raven’s thinly sliced red onion. Call me a wimp, but Signe’s spring onion and Simon and Lindsey’s chives suit my tastes far better, adding flavour without overpowering the other ingredients.
Constance Spry wisely observes that a good potato salad “should be garnished with some sharp ingredient such as capers, sliced gherkin or sliced pickled walnuts to relieve the somewhat cloying taste of potatoes”. Which you choose is largely up to you, but, never one to stint, I’ve thrown in both capers and gherkins, inspired by Signe’s recipe, and (and perhaps controversially), the anchovies suggested by Sarah Raven – they just go so beautifully with potato. A good dollop of wholegrain mustard, as in Signe’s dressing, adds both texture and flavour to the mayonnaise, but I’m leaving out the chopped hardboiled egg used in both the Riverford and Scandilicious recipes – with mayonnaise as well, I find the whole thing too rich.
You could just stick with chives, but I think another layer of herbs contributes a welcome freshness: Sarah Raven finishes her salad off with a cornucopia of dill, basil, thyme, coriander, parsley, fennel, chives and mint, but, as I don’t have a herb garden to raid, I’m confining myself to the pepperiness of parsley and a little cooling mint. (Interestingly The Prawn Cocktail Years recipe cooks the potatoes with a few sprigs of mint, but I’m unable to taste this in the finished dish, clever as it sounds). Best served at park temperature, with a hearty slab of ham, or a piece of poached fish, and a woolly blanket.
Perfect potato salad
Serves 4
600g waxy potatoes
½ tsp Dijon mustard
1 tbsp red wine vinegar
2 tbsp vegetable oil
1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
115g good mayonnaise
1 tbsp wholegrain mustard
3 spring onions, thinly sliced
2 tbsp capers, chopped
2 anchovies, finely chopped
Small bunch of chives, finely chopped
Handful of parsley, finely chopped
Handful of mint, finely chopped
1. Boil the potatoes in well salted water for about 15 minutes until tender. Meanwhile, whisk together the mustard and vinegar with a pinch of salt, then whisk in the oils. Cut the cooked potatoes into halves, or quarters if large and toss with the dressing, then leave to cool.
2. Stir the remaining ingredients into the mayonnaise, keeping back a pinch of each of the herbs for garnish, then, when the potatoes are cool, drain off any remaining vinaigrette and toss them into the mayonnaise.
3. Garnish with herbs and serve.
Are you for mayo or vinaigrette when it comes to potato salad, or will anyone admit to a Scandinavian taste for salad cream? And what other dishes find their way into your picnic basket (OK, carrier bag) year after year – do any other salads travel quite as well in your experience?
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
How to make perfect potato salad
I love a good potato salad with everything….alond with a sandwich,chicken,with the barbecue, or just simply as a snack. Everyone has their own recipe and so do the supermarkets…my mom’s sister always made her special potato salad with apples everytime we came for a visit…so what are your waiting for? Start boiling those potatoes!
We British love a picnic. The first ray of sunshine carpets parks, verges and even kerbs with al fresco diners, happily cramming in scotch eggs and pork pies like they’re going out of fashion – because, although in theory you can decant anything you like on to your tartan rug, our climate dictates that the sustenance in question should be relatively hearty.
Quiches, sticky sausages, Dundee cake; perhaps a few carrot batons or cherry tomatoes as a concession to health, but in general, the British picnic on foodstuffs that, along with a fiery glug of ginger beer or a warming glass of cider, offer some protection against a “fresh” breeze or the occasional spot of rain.
Potato salad, then has some claim to being the supreme example, the appending of the word “salad” giving it a summery, if not particularly healthy air, and the hearty combination of carbohydrate and mayonnaise suggesting valuable insulating properties. It also happens to go very well with other picnic staples, like cold salmon or ham sandwiches. Yotam Ottolenghi may do a mean grilled courgette and fennel with saffron crumbs, but as my granny would have said, it won’t put hairs on your chest.
Waxy v floury
The eternal question with any potato recipe, this is one of the few dishes in which the British embrace the waxy potato with as much enthusiasm as our continental neighbours. Nigel Slater, writing in Tender, suggests that they aren’t the only option however: “The other approach is to use a floury King Edward-style potato, boiled till its edges fray, then cut into crumbling slices … it provides a salad of hearty rusticity”. I see what he means, but I don’t like the way the King Edwards fall apart when I toss them with the dressing, creating a mayonnaisey, potatoey mush instead of anything that could kindly be described as a salad, rustic or otherwise. Waxy it is – particularly given the quality of the new potatoes at this time of year.
Peel appeal
Most recipes call for one to peel the potatoes, generally after cooking but Nigel again offers a rare voice of dissent. “I like the rusticity of an unskinned potato salad,” he admits, “but there is also something very elegant about a salad made from skinned new potatoes”. Having burned my fingers trying to peel potatoes straight from the pan once too often, I struggle to see the elegance, but more importantly, I think that potato skins add both texture and flavour to the dish – without them, it could almost be anything lurking beneath the mayonnaise. If you do leave them on, however, it’s important to make sure there’s enough skinned surface area to absorb the dressing, which means choosing slightly larger potatoes, and cutting them into halves or quarters.
Dressing up, dressing down
Some of you may well think that, if one is stupid enough to try and peel hot potatoes, minor burns are no more than just desserts – in which case I refer you to Constance Spry’s observation, in her nigh legendary Cookery Book, that it is of prime importance that “the dressing should be poured over the cooked potatoes while these are still hot in order that it may penetrate into the slices”. This is certainly true: most of the vinaigrette added to cold cooked potatoes runs off, and ends up in the bottom of the bowl.
What kind of dressing to use, however, is less clear. Jane Grigson’s Vegetable Book suggests that it must be “well-flavoured”, suggesting white wine or vinaigrette. Constance Spry, the Riverford Farm Cook Book, and the Prawn Cocktail Years all plump for the latter, and I can see why – wine just isn’t acidic enough here: the bland, almost buttery flavour of a new potato needs something sharper. Riverford Farm uses a simple oil and vinegar mixture, but adding a little mustard, as Simon Hopkinson and Lindsey Bareham do, gives a nice little kick.
Mayonnaise
Some recipes, like that in the Prawn Cocktail Years, just stop there – allow the potatoes to cool in their dressing, garnish with a few herbs, and tuck in. (“Although it can be fine to use mayonnaise,” the authors admit, somewhat grudgingly, “its thickness smears rather than coats the potato”.) Most, however, add a second dressing, once the potatoes have cooled down. Jane Grigson suggests a simple mayonnaise, Riverford Farm use a combination of mayo, crème fraîche and Greek yoghurt, which I find a little too sour, and Constance Spry deploys what she calls a “coleslaw dressing”, which involves boiling together vinegar, mustard, salt, flour and sugar, beating in eggs and butter, and then finishing off with cream. The result reminds me, not entirely pleasurably, of supermarket coleslaw – sweet and vinegary and oddly cloying. A simple mayonnaise seems by far the best option. If it ain’t broke …
Some recipes skip the vinaigrette stage altogether, and head straight for the mayonnaise – both Sarah Raven and Signe Johansen allow their spuds to drain for 15 minutes, and then toss them in a thick dressing. The former uses mayonnaise, enlivened with garlic and mustard powder, the latter goes for an unholy marriage of sour cream and salad cream. Given the dish is billed, in Signe’s hitherto faultless Scandilicious book, as a “pepped-up version of a traditional Scandinavian dill, egg and potato salad”, I’m prepared to allow the salad cream as an ingredient whose charms have been lost in translation – because, even in such tiny quantities (1 tbsp to 200ml sour cream), it brings back hideous memories of wet, limp iceberg and other school dinner horrors. (The recipe also leaves me a bottle looking for a good home, if anyone’s interested?) In both cases however, I feel the lack of tangy vinaigrette – without it, the potatoes and dressing remain in two separate layers.
Additions: a fishy caper
Alliums are a popular addition to potato salads – as Jane Grigson notes, this is “not a ladylike dish: it should have a direct appeal, from the delicate earthiness that characterises good potatoes and the sweet fire of a good onion”. I find her raw Spanish onion too much of a good thing however (cuddling up for warmth loses some of its appeal when you have to keep apologising for your lunch choices), and the same goes for Sarah Raven’s thinly sliced red onion. Call me a wimp, but Signe’s spring onion and Simon and Lindsey’s chives suit my tastes far better, adding flavour without overpowering the other ingredients.
Constance Spry wisely observes that a good potato salad “should be garnished with some sharp ingredient such as capers, sliced gherkin or sliced pickled walnuts to relieve the somewhat cloying taste of potatoes”. Which you choose is largely up to you, but, never one to stint, I’ve thrown in both capers and gherkins, inspired by Signe’s recipe, and (and perhaps controversially), the anchovies suggested by Sarah Raven – they just go so beautifully with potato. A good dollop of wholegrain mustard, as in Signe’s dressing, adds both texture and flavour to the mayonnaise, but I’m leaving out the chopped hardboiled egg used in both the Riverford and Scandilicious recipes – with mayonnaise as well, I find the whole thing too rich.
You could just stick with chives, but I think another layer of herbs contributes a welcome freshness: Sarah Raven finishes her salad off with a cornucopia of dill, basil, thyme, coriander, parsley, fennel, chives and mint, but, as I don’t have a herb garden to raid, I’m confining myself to the pepperiness of parsley and a little cooling mint. (Interestingly The Prawn Cocktail Years recipe cooks the potatoes with a few sprigs of mint, but I’m unable to taste this in the finished dish, clever as it sounds). Best served at park temperature, with a hearty slab of ham, or a piece of poached fish, and a woolly blanket.
Perfect potato salad
Serves 4
600g waxy potatoes
½ tsp Dijon mustard
1 tbsp red wine vinegar
2 tbsp vegetable oil
1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
115g good mayonnaise
1 tbsp wholegrain mustard
3 spring onions, thinly sliced
2 tbsp capers, chopped
2 anchovies, finely chopped
Small bunch of chives, finely chopped
Handful of parsley, finely chopped
Handful of mint, finely chopped
1. Boil the potatoes in well salted water for about 15 minutes until tender. Meanwhile, whisk together the mustard and vinegar with a pinch of salt, then whisk in the oils. Cut the cooked potatoes into halves, or quarters if large and toss with the dressing, then leave to cool.
2. Stir the remaining ingredients into the mayonnaise, keeping back a pinch of each of the herbs for garnish, then, when the potatoes are cool, drain off any remaining vinaigrette and toss them into the mayonnaise.
3. Garnish with herbs and serve.
Are you for mayo or vinaigrette when it comes to potato salad, or will anyone admit to a Scandinavian taste for salad cream? And what other dishes find their way into your picnic basket (OK, carrier bag) year after year – do any other salads travel quite as well in your experience?
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.