The Explosively Flavorful Ingredients Your Potato Salad Needs
NEWS
By LYLA PORTER
Bacon
Cook up a few bacon strips, chop them into pieces, and crumble them into your potato salad to add a whole new dimension of flavor. You can use bacon fat, too.
After cooking the bacon, drain off some fat. Stir in vinegar, sugar, and scrape up bacon bits before adding potatoes, chopped bacon, and parsley for a tangy, salty, and sweet dish.
Mustard
While a spoonful of yellow mustard will lend the brightest color and a sharp zing to your potato salad, adding Dijon mustard will lend a slightly more sophisticated flavor.
Incorporate grainy mustard to add a little texture to the salad. You can also cook with mustard seeds — especially black mustard seeds — themselves for a pop of flavor.
Vinegar
Because of its acidity, you can use vinegar to cut the creamy, fatty flavor profile of certain dishes. Vinegar-based potato salads are lighter and fresher tasting.
Opt for a vinaigrette made with champagne or red wine vinegar for a French-style potato salad. You can add chopped green beans or stick with fresh herbs and green onion or shallot.
Fresh Herbs
Finely chop fresh herbs such as parsley, chives, or dill into your potato salad for added freshness and flavor. Thyme and basil are also excellent options.
Make sure to start with less and taste and add more as you cook. If you want to make something extra herbaceous, you could consider flavoring your potato salad with pesto.
Eggs
Russian salad, also known as Olivier salad, is a potato salad variation that includes carrots and pickles and often incorporates eggs, peas, and sometimes even meat.
The addition of hard-boiled eggs will add protein to your salad while also lending a nice pale yellow color from the yolks. You can dice the egg up finely or leave larger slices.