What We’re Cooking This Week: Potato Salad

Wellspent Market founder Jim Dixon has been writing about food and restaurants for Willamette Week for a long time. He wants our readers to eat well, and he shows them how with the recipes he creates just for us by using simple cooking techniques and easy-to-find ingredients.

We like to think potato salad is an all-American classic. But the earliest known recipe came from Austria in the 1600s after Europeans had a hundred years of potato eating behind them. It was another couple of centuries before mayonnaise came along thanks to the saucy French, but it wasn’t until German American Richard Hellman started selling his wife’s mayo in jars at his New York deli that the golden age of potato salad began.

Russet potatoes, hard-boiled eggs, chopped onions and celery, and sometimes pickles got tossed with a healthy dollop of that newfangled mayo in a jar, and the results became a staple at picnics and cookouts. And while a well-made classic potato salad is a thing of beauty, all too often a heavy hand with the mayo results in a gloppy mess.

This version skips the mayonnaise in favor of a mayo-adjacent dressing made with good olive oil, apple cider vinegar, Dijon mustard, and just barely cooked egg yolks. The vinegar provides the acidic tang that usually comes from pickles, so I leave them out. But if you can’t imagine potato salad without them, add a few chopped cornichons or even a spoonful of pickle relish.

Recipe

1 pound yellow potato (3 tennis ball–size spuds)

2 eggs

1 tablespoons apple cider vinegar

1 teaspoon kosher-style sea salt

½ teaspoon sugar

1 teaspoon Dijon-style mustard

3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1 large shallot

2-3 celery stalks, preferably the inner stalks with leaves

Freshly ground black pepper

Put the whole potatoes in a saucepan, add enough water to cover them and a pinch of salt, bring to a boil, and cook until they’re easily pierced with the tip of a knife, about 25 minutes. Drain and let cool until you can handle them, then use your fingers to slip off the peel.

While the potatoes cook, bring another small saucepan of water to a boil, gently lower the eggs into it, and cook for 9 minutes. Drain and cool briefly under cold running water, then peel off the shells.

In a bowl large enough to hold all the ingredients, dissolve the salt and sugar in the vinegar, then stir in the mustard. Cut the eggs in half and use a spoon to scoop out the yolks (they should be jammy, not cooked hard). Add the yolks to the vinegar and mix well, then add the olive oil and stir to emulsify.

Cut the cooked potatoes into smallish bite-sized pieces (roughly ¼ to ½ inch). Cut the shallot into quarters and slice thinly. Slice the celery stalks into thin strips and chop into small pieces; chop the celery leaves and the whites from the hard-boiled eggs. Add everything to the dressing along with the pepper and mix well. Taste and add salt as needed. I think this is best if you let it rest in the refrigerator for a couple of hours, then serve chilled.