Add This Savory Ingredient To Your Potato Salad For A Delicious Flavor Upgrade

If you make old-fashioned potato salad on the regular, you may be interested in upgrading your go-to recipe with a whole new addition. Instead of sprinkling this side dish with seasonings and other dried herbs and spices like garlic and onion powder, you may want to add an ingredient that gives potato salad a more prominent boost of flavor, texture, and visual appeal. In that case, all you need is capers. These zesty, bite-size foods give creamy potato salad an unexpected yet satisfying jolt of acidic flavor.

For a little context, capers are the unripe buds of the capparis spinosa bush which typically grows in places like Asia and Southern Europe. Once harvested, these tiny buds are dried, preserved, and jarred in a briny liquid or packed in salt. In terms of flavor, capers generally exude a tangy essence similar to olives with a mildly herbaceous taste and salty bite. When added to traditional potato salad, they complement the neutral taste of both cooked potatoes and creamy mayonnaise. Sure enough, capers provide this classic salad just enough brightness to create an ultra-flavorful side dish with the perfect amount of depth.

Lucky for you, capers blend well into more than one variation of potato salad. While they can certainly cut through some of the creaminess of classic recipes featuring ingredients like mayonnaise and buttermilk, you can also use capers to build a whole new potato salad recipe.

For starters, if you prefer to keep the mayo in your favorite potato salad recipe, consider adjusting your dressing to give this dish a brighter flavor. To give the added capers room to shine, make a zestier dressing with whole-grain Dijon mustard and lemon juice. Or, feel free to play around with different varieties of mustard and choose one that melds best with your salad. Other flavorful options include stone-ground and spicy brown mustard. To really lean into the briny flavor of capers, you can also go one step further and add some of the juice from your caper jar.

Alternatively, you can skip out on the mayo and make an herbed potato salad with a dressing composed of olive oil, whole-grain mustard, apple cider vinegar, and lemon juice. You can also incorporate a variety of fresh herbs like parsley and dill for an ultra-fresh flavor.

Whichever dressing you decide to use, make sure to imbue your caper-infused potato salad with a good assortment of crunchy veggies and one or two more briny extras. After all, the right additions can successfully balance the creaminess of cooked potatoes. Consider mixing in some diced celery and red onion for extra crunch. Minced shallots and cut green beans are also solid options. For a more impactful bite, add in some chopped pickles, green and purple olives, and springy green onions. Surely, with capers, you can make any homemade potato salad a winning side dish.