Light, tangy, and full of flavor.
So why is it that there are so many mediocre potato salads? What could possibly go wrong in a recipe that's really got no more than two steps?The way I see it, there are three things that can go wrong with a potato salad. Screw up any one of these, and you're quickly going south:. In a good potato salad, the pieces of potato should be seasoned all the way through to the core.
It gets even more complex: Since potatoes heat up from the exterior towards the center, it's possible to have a potato that's simultaneously overcookedundercooked. The best way to accomplish this feat of culinary indecency is to drop your cut potatoes into a pot of already-boiling water, like I did to the potato below:When the potato starts in hot water, the outside rapidly begins to overcook before the center has even got the chill off of it.
For some time I've thought that it's better to season your potatoes when they are hot, but I'd never actually figured outTo find out, I cooked three separate batches of potatoes, using green food coloring as a stand-in for the salt and vinegar. The first batch I cooked directly in green-colored water. The second batch I cooked in plain water, then seasoned with green-colored water after draining while they were still hot.
Look carefully at the time-lapse photos below, and you can see that the potato on the right, which was taken a full 30 minutes after the potatoes were drained, is ever so slightly smaller than the potato on the photo at the left .The difference may look small to the naked eye, but to a molecule of vinegar trying to work its way into a spud, that makes all the difference in the world.
I knew that waxy potatoes would yield a slightly firmer texture in the finished salad, but that's not necessarily a good thing. More importantly, how would they take to seasoning?The results were clear:A russet potato, with its granular, open texture, is far better at absorbing seasoning than its dense, waxy, red counterpart. Russets for the win.Now that the potatoes were perfectly cooked, light, and bright, the rest was simple: balancing flavors. Nothing too hardcore nerdy here.
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