I cannot tell you how many times I breeze past the ubiquitous potato salad at picnics, buffets, barbeques, and potlucks. They always show up yet there are always more exciting things to pile on my plate. Besides, I gotta pick and choose my calories wisely to maintain my girlish figure! Suffice to say I do not have strong feelings about potato salads.
That all changed this week when I had my first taste of Dilled Potato & Pickled Cucumber Salad from smitten kitchen's recipe. Let me count the ways that made me swoon with every bite.
Colourful assortment of potatoes cooked just to the point of fork-tenderness? Check.
Tart and briny homemade cucumber pickles with fresh taste of dill? Check.
Peppery mini radishes and sweet red onions for some crunch? Check.
Luscious hand-beaten mayonnaise made from instruction of the one and only Julia Child? Check.
What initially prompted this slightly involved salad was a windfall of waxy potatoes from this week's CSA share. Obviously I could take the easy path of roasting with olive oil and rosemary. However, that wonderful array of colours was just too pretty to be hidden under blistered caramelization. Staring out the window at the snow-less yard and feeling the gradually warming temperature, my thought turned to potato salad. Riffling through a few of my favourite blogs and I eventually settled on this recipe mostly because of Deb's strong recommendation.
The thing about cooking versus baking is that there is a lot more wiggling room for me to adapt a recipe to my needs and likes. I chopped my potatoes to roughly 2cm chunks and boiled the blue potatoes and fingerlings in separate batches so both were cooked to exactly the point of fork-tenderness. Nothing more, nothing less. As soon as they were done, I shocked them in cold water to stop the cooking. The pickled cucumbers were made using 8 mini cukes instead of the bigger English cucumbers because I thought the proportion would be much more in line with the mini radishes I also used from my CSA share. The homemade mayonnaise? All I can say is it is worth the elbow grease! Now that I regularly have farm-fresh eggs in my fridge, it's only logical that I put them to work in the best possible way. As a homecook, making my first batch of mayonnaise from scratch by hand is a rite of passage. The technique of emulsifying egg yolks with oil forms the basis of many other condiments. It harkens back to a time when homecooking did not mean reheating processed food and mayonnaise was not always synonymous with a jar on the supermarket shelf. Besides, the whole process of turning egg yolk, oil, mustard, vinegar, and salt into billowy creamy mayonnaise is a remarkable transformation. Magical, even. I whisked and whisked and whisked until I stopped listening to my arm's complaint. Would it curdle? What would I do if it breaks? I was anxious and excited to see the metamorphosis.
If you're like me and regularly prepare meals for one or two servings, dressing the salad all in one go may not be practical. I store all the ingredients in separate containers in the fridge and dress them one dish at a time just before serving. Not only do the individual components retain their texture, it is also easier for me to weight them for my diet food journal. This is the proportion I use for one serving:
- 200g boiled potatoes
- 40g pickled cucumbers
- 15g sliced radishes
- 15g diced red onions
- 1 sprig of chopped dill
- 20g mayonnaise
Go ahead and make this salad. Your effort will be handsomely rewarded. It rocked my world and honestly, it's too good to keep it to myself.
