The 19 Best Potato Salad Recipes to Freshen Up Your Summer Menu (2024)

FAQs

Why does my potato salad taste bland? ›

If it's a potato salad, be sure to let the potatoes cool (the starch cells close up) before adding any dressing or salad mixture. Warm potatoes will soak up the liquids. Taste an hour after mixing and see if the spices need tweaking. Mashed potatoes do the same thing if you add in the garlic or cheddar cheese too soon.

Potatoes can retain moisture. To prevent this, drain the potatoes very well in a colander or pot. Allow all the steam to escape the potatoes before mixing them with the dressing and other ingredients.

To keep your salad from falling apart into mush, it's important to use the best potatoes for potato salad. Skip the russet potatoes and use a waxy variety instead, like Yukon gold, red potatoes or fingerlings. Learn more about which types of potatoes you should use for different recipes.

Herbs, fruits, peppers, change your olive oil or try sesame, hazelnut or other traditional nut oils. Also try our variety of basils: Large Green, lemon-basil, spicy Thai, etc.

If you have added too much mayo to your potato salad, you can fix it by adding more of the other ingredients to balance out the flavor. You can add more boiled potatoes, hard-boiled eggs, diced pickles, onions, celery, or mustard.

Boiling potatoes for potato salad is time-consuming and often waterlogs the potatoes. Here's a simple way to cook your potatoes for a better texture — no pot of boiling water required!

Store leftover potato salad in a ziplock plastic freezer and squeeze out as much air as possible without squishing the potato salad. Use within three months of freezing. A warm potato salad will fare better because you can heat it back up, but cold, defrosted potato salad is a lackluster version of its former self.

Texture: Allowing the potatoes to cool helps them firm up slightly, preventing them from becoming too mushy or breaking apart when you mix them with other ingredients. Flavor Absorption: As the potatoes cool, they have the opportunity to absorb some of the flavors from the dressing or other ingredients in the salad.

Yep. The most common potatoes we use for McDonald's fries include the Russet Burbank, Russet Ranger, Umatilla Russet and the Shepody—varieties known for producing a flavorful fry that's crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside.

What potatoes do chefs use? ›

Round White AKA Chef Potatoes

B is the most common in foodservice.

1. Restaurants use really good ingredients. Your ingredients can decide whether your salad turns out average or extraordinary, Jamie Simpson, executive chef liaison at The Chef's Garden, told Allrecipes. "Restaurant-quality salads start with restaurant-quality ingredients," he said.

If you don't add enough salt, the potatoes will be bland. It's surprising that such a simple ingredient would make a big difference, but it will. Adding salt to the cooking water also helps the potatoes could faster and break apart better, resulting in fluffier and creamier mashed potatoes.

Leaving salt out means you're starting off with bland potatoes. Follow this tip: Begin the process of seasoning your mashed potatoes by adding salt to the water when cooking the potatoes. You won't have to add as much salt later and, most importantly, you won't find yourself with bland potatoes.

Not Seasoning the Water

Potatoes absorb the water they are cooked in, so go ahead and add salt to the water before you cook the potatoes, just as you do when cooking pasta. If you leave out the salt at this point, you will get tasteless potatoes, and butter and sour cream simply can't cover the taste of a flat potato.

Drop a whole russet into the pot and by the time the outside has cooked through, the inside will still be raw. Larger potatoes should be cubed to ensure they cook evenly (peeled first if desired). Smaller potatoes tend to have thin skins and can be boiled whole, no peeling required.