For A More Flavorful Potato Salad, Reach For This Creamy Cheese

Potato salad may be a must-have side at barbecues, picnics, and various holiday dinners, but if you've been relying on the same old recipe, it's time to shake things up a bit. While there are plenty of additions you can toss in your potato salad, from bacon to caramelized onions, one ingredient that truly elevates this dish is goat cheese. Fresh goat cheese, known as chèvre, with its creamy texture and tangy taste, is easy to add — it can be mixed in with the rest of the dressing ingredients or crumbled on top.

In the first instance, it makes for an extra-creamy, tangy dressing when whisked together with Greek yogurt or sour cream, mustard, and an acid, such as vinegar or lemon juice. The goat cheese also provides an earthiness that gives potato salad a wonderful depth of flavor. Meanwhile, crumbling the cheese on top of potato salad provides little pockets of goaty goodness that act as exclamation points in every bite. There are a wide variety of goat cheese styles to play around with, and various fresh herbs that work well with this cheese, for an even more flavorful potato salad.

Goat cheese works in both warm and cold potato salad recipes, and either creamy or vinegar-based versions (including German potato salad). It's also a flavorful tip for elevating sweet potato salads, especially when the sweet potatoes are roasted and paired with a variety of herbs, such as dill, basil, rosemary, and chives. This pairing works because these herbs' flavors provide a counterpoint to the cheese's acidity while the cheese intensifies the herbs' bright flavors.

Although chèvre tends to be the most widely used style of goat cheese, for both warm and cold potato salads, there's nothing that says you can't explore other goat cheese styles. As opposed to fresh goat cheese, aged varieties have different textures and flavors. Shavings of aged goat Gouda in a warm potato salad bring a nuttiness and sweet-savory bite. A super-decadent herbed potato salad might include the soft-rinded Humboldt Fog, which is creamy, with a buttermilk-like bright tanginess. Combining fresh goat cheese with aged is another possibility since these two styles of cheese offer different flavor profiles. Once you begin exploring the possibilities of potato salad and goat cheese combinations, you're only limited by your imagination.