The Recipe That Made Me Love Potato Salad

Today I'm going to be showing you how to make a delicious potato salad for summer. This wasn't really my favorite side dish for summer growing up. I didn't always love potato salad but that wasn't until I made it for myself and I think this recipe is delicious. It has great texture, great flavor. It's different than a traditional deli potato salad but I think it's great and I've also had a lot of family members try it that didn't really care for potato salad but they told me they loved it so that's always a good sign. So let's get right into it. So before we cut up our potatoes we're going to make the sauce or the dressing for it. First we're going to do half a cup of mayonnaise. I'm going to measure this just to make sure that I am exact. Just add that to a bowl and then I'm going to do two teaspoons of Dijon mustard. This is nice for a little bit of tangy flavor. Then we'll do two tablespoons of sherry vinegar. You could also use apple cider vinegar. I like sherry it has a nice flavor to it. I always sing the song sherry whenever I'm talking about using this vinegar. Then next an ingredient that I think is really key in a potato salad is not only pickles but we're using the bread and butter pickles. I think that these have really great flavor. I've used the dill pickles in this recipe but anytime I use the bread and butter I just think it adds just a really great flavor. So we're going to do about a third cup of these pickles chopped nice and small. These also add a nice crunch, great texture. We've all had a potato salad that we're not really a big fan of and I feel like it needed bread and butter pickles. Most potato salads I feel like just taste like mayonnaise and potatoes. So this is a great addition. All right then we'll add that to our dressing. Then we're going to do one tablespoon of the pickling juice from the pickles. Then for some more crunch I have one celery rib. I keep saying stalk it's a rib so I'm going to finely dice this. Nice for some more texture however I feel like if you don't have celery on hand the pickles will do just fine for some nice crunch. That's one small celery rib and then I have two green onions here. I'm just going to actually do the top of them. I'm going to cut the top off first and we're just going to do the green part. We'll save the onion for another recipe but this adds a really nice bite of onion that I feel like is needed. I tested this recipe a lot and this was one of the last things that I added. It just finished the flavor. Put that in and then on top of that we also have some chives from the garden. Mine are a bit gangly because they are from the garden but I'm going to use about three to four tablespoons of the chives. These are really nice and mild in flavor but they add just that nice bite of onion. I actually had red onion in the recipe and you can totally add it but I didn't want to like have people telling me I was using too much onion. Didn't want to scare anyone away but you can add red onion which I feel like is not too oniony to this for more crunch but I'm going to leave it out today. Add our chives then we're going to add a half teaspoon each of onion powder and garlic powder. This might seem like a lot but it's for flavor. So then we're going to do a generous crack of black pepper and then we're going to do a teaspoon of some kosher salt. We might need some more. I'll just do a generous amount now. Those potatoes really eat up the salt and they need a lot of it. So speaking of potatoes we have them here. I had those cooking until they were fork tender. I also salted the water that they were in and I have two pounds of yellow potatoes here. I did not peel them. I actually like the texture of some of the skin on there but they kind of naturally peel as you cut them. Biggest thing is you don't want your potatoes to be undercooked. Even the slightest bit it affects the recipe so it's better to overcook them than to undercook them. But we'll just cut these up into big chunks and I think with potato salad I don't really like it to turn too mush or to kind of mash potatoes. So I keep the chunks, you know, not too small just so that we have texture and still some shape there. One of the most important things with a potato salad, some people might disagree to this because of convenience of cooking potatoes in advance, I like to add the potatoes when they're warm. That way the potatoes really absorb the mayonnaise and the dressing but when they're cold I find that they kind of seize up. It's the same as chicken salad and it's just better that way. It really helps the potatoes just absorb all the flavors and the dressing. So I recommend adding them warm which these ones are. They're very hot when they come out of pot so let them cool down. And some people like to add hard-boiled eggs to their potato salad. I'm not a huge fan of hard-boiled eggs so I don't add them but you totally can. We're going to mix this together but I was supposed to mix the dressing before adding the potatoes but that's okay. And you can really see the dressing even from here how it is absorbing into the potatoes and if they were cold if you had refrigerated them before, you know, adding them to this it's not going to really absorb into the potatoes as much. You can still do it but I think it's worth doing a warmed potato salad. All right so now I'm going to taste it. One thing about potato salad. It is kind of one of those recipes that if you don't salt it enough it'll just rip the rug right on from under you especially if you're serving it to a crowd of people. That happened to me. You know you season it with all these delicious ingredients and then it's under salted and you just can't taste all those things. It's just like really I flavored you with so many things. And so make sure that you salt to taste your potato salad. So before you serve it especially if it sits in the fridge and you pull it out I would taste it because the refrigerator can kind of it kind of dulls the salt flavor a little bit. So it's good to try it before you serve it. Delicious. That is so good. I'm gonna add a pinch of salt but it is delicious. And honestly I give a lot of credit to those bread and butter pickles. I like I said made this with dill pickles and I think that the flavor from the bread and butter is fantastic and it's just a lot more of an interesting flavor. So this is delicious. This is I mean something that I've served. I served this for the 4th of July for our get-together and I had two of my family members my cousin and my sister told me that they don't like potato salad and they love this. So I think it's delicious and there's a lot of ways that you can flavor potato salad. Everybody makes it in their own way. This is just the way that I like to make it and I think it's I think it's delicious. You might be biased but you could try a fork of it Drew and let me know what you think. I asked Drew actually to come from behind the camera and try it. You've had this a lot but I honestly think it's the best. I love it. I mean potato salad to me is the best side at any cookout but they're not always great and this is this is amazing. I love it so much. The potatoes are really cooked well because they still have a little bit of texture but like for the most part they're just like melt in your mouth delicious. What do you think of the flavors and stuff from the butter pickles? I think the pickles are doing a great job and because you get you can taste those but it's not overwhelming and then you get a little bit of that vinegar taste too I think. And the bite of the green onion is really good but it's not too oniony right? You don't think it's too oniony? No no it's not overwhelming. Honestly everything's so well balanced. You did a really good job. Good. I would easily have that whole bowl. Well you can. So good. Yeah well thanks for trying it. Yeah I think this would be perfect with smash burgers or something like that. We do have our smash burgers you can totally make this with. Some hot dogs, hamburgers and hot dogs. Perfect. As my family always says. But yeah all right well I hope you guys enjoy this. It's potato salad but it's a really good one so try it out let me know what you think and I will catch you guys on the next recipe and I'll see you in the comments.