Pesto Potato Salad Recipe (2024)

FAQs

How to keep potatoes from falling apart when making potato salad? ›

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.

There's no reason at all, so my advice is to leave the skins on. The skin on a potato adds a nice texture and flavor to the potato salad and it's also the healthiest part.

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. Steaming the potatoes instead of boiling them is a good way to ensure that excess moisture isn't trapped inside.

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!

Rinsing potatoes helps remove excess starch, so it is recommended to rinse the potatoes before cooking. To ensure even more starch is out of the way, it's recommended that they even be quickly rinsed after boiling. We recommend using hot water for rinsing after boiling and cold water prior to boiling.

If you want to cut down on the mayo, start with a vinaigrette, then add some yogurt or buttermilk to make it creamy. Don't cut back on your usual amounts of salt and pepper, or the salad will be too bland. You might want to think about adding some fresh herbs. Dill is nice, as is cilantro.

As Wiggly Wisdom shares, a vinegary potato salad can easily be salvaged with a bit of lemon zest. Just take a fine grater or zester to the rind, measure out about a half teaspoon of zest per two cups of potato salad, and mix it in. Orange and lime also work if you don't have any lemon on hand.

It's actually the potatoes. Being a root vegetable, they sit in dirt for a long time and that dirt often harbors bacteria. When potato salad is served at warm events like picnics or barbecues, the heat can cause this bacteria to multiply, leading to the spoilage of the entire dish.

Always cut up the potatoes into a dice before boiling them. If you boil the potatoes whole, the exterior of the potato will get too soft and crumbly before the interior has a chance to cook through. Best potatoes for potato salad? Russet, Yukon Gold, or red potatoes (new potatoes) are all excellent for potato salad.

How do you make potatoes not fall apart? ›

Most often, then, the solution to evenly cooked potatoes is cooking them twice: First, boil, steam, or steam-roast (a fancy term for cooking them with water in the oven) until they're mostly tender but not fall-apart finished. Second, brown the outsides and finish cooking the interiors on the stovetop or in the oven.

I just made a potato salad, and I undercooked the potatoes- they are semi hard...and I aready mixed everything together, is there anything I can do to fix it, without throwing it out? Microwave it for about 30-40 sec until they soften how you like them. Make sure to refrigerate after and cool before eating.

When you factor in the other ingredients (such as mayonnaise) this reduces the usable shelf life even more. Because of this combination, I suggest cooking the potatoes on Saturday afternoon, refrigerating, then finish prepping the potato salad that evening or Sunday morning and consuming within two days.

Russet, Yukon Gold, or red potatoes (new potatoes) are all excellent for potato salad. They do cook at different rates so be sure to adjust cook time depending on which type of potato you select.