Best Potato Salad With Homemade Dressing...

Best Potato Salad With Homemade Dressing Goes Well With A Steak Or Burgers
This potato salad features red potatoes that are pre-cooked, and then refrigerated over night so the finished salad is not mushy. I prefer red potatoes for the flavor, and the texture once they are cooked with the skins on. The dressing for this salad is made with the same recipe I use for Coleslaw.

Ingredients and Method

Six to eight medium large red potatoes, pick out the ‘eyes’ in the potatoes with a knife or with the end of a potato peeler, and discard, cook the potatoes in water with the skins on. Add a dash of salt to the water to lower the temperature where the water will boil. This is an old trick to speed up cooking time.
A steak knife inserted in potatoes goes through easily when potatoes are cooked. If you wish to, you can par-boil the potatoes and finish the cooking in the microwave.

I don’t recommend completely cooking potatoes for this salad in the microwave because it can make the finished product too dry.
Remember to add a couple of tablespoons of water to the bowl whenever you microwave potatoes or any other vegetable.

Place cooked potatoes in a bowl with their skins on, and refrigerate over night. The skins on the potatoes will protect by preventing the starch in the potatoes from turning brown in the cold refrigerator.

The Salad Dressing:

Smart Balance ½ calorie mayonnaise, a ½ cup
Your favorite low calorie sour cream, a ½ cup
Four to six packets of ‘natural’ or four to six tablespoons of brown sugar
Two to four tablespoons of red wine vinegar
One or two tablespoons of your favorite prepared mustard
A dash of salt and pepper to taste remember that the mayo already is seasoned with salt
Mix together whipping the ingredients until the finished product is blended.
You can add more or less sugar and vinegar to your taste.

The Vegetables Added To The Potato Salad:

Two stalks deep green celery, washed and chopped
A half of a medium sized red onion, or a white ‘sweet’ onion, chopped
Deep green ‘long’ onions, sometimes called ‘scallions’ on the East Coast, washed, trim the roots from the bulbs and chop the green onions into pieces, use as many as you wish to use in the potato salad, and use some as a garnish on top of the finished salad
You can add some chopped parsley and or cilantro to this vegetable mix if you like the flavor of either of these two garnish vegetables.

You can add chopped, hard cooked eggs to this potato salad. You will need six large or six jumbo-sized eggs, hardboiled. Cover the eggs with water, in a saucepan, bring the eggs to a boil, and then turn off the heat. The eggs will continue to cook. It takes at least fifteen minutes for this procedure.
Add a dash of salt to the water to lower the boiling temperature.
Add a tablespoon of cider vinegar to the water to stop egg white ‘leak’ from any of the eggs that may crack during cooking. The vinegar seals eggshell cracks, and prevents egg leak. You can cook the eggs the night before.

For added flavor, the day you make the salad you can fry up several strips of bacon and chop up adding to the salad dressing.
If the bacon is salty then don’t add any other salt to the dressing, so the dressing won’t become too salty.

Finish

Chop up the cold, cooked potatoes, and add to a bowl large enough to hold all the ingredients and have room to toss the salad; add the chopped hard cooked eggs, and chopped up vegetables. Toss all with the homemade salad dressing with bacon. This potato salad keeps in the refrigerator for at least five days if you should have any left over.
This salad is a delicious side dish with a steak, burgers, your favorite hot dogs, or fried chicken.


Copyright © 2010 by Carol Garnier Dutra
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