Potato salad season

I truly believe that I have never met a potato salad I didn’t like.  Some of them, however, are calorie bombs.  Many of them are not safe to leave out on a table or a buffet for very long. Italian potato salad doesn’t have those problems.

Summer romance

You begin with potatoes, of course, but then you need the above: basil or parsley and garlic.  This is basil, because mine grew apace while I was away and the parsley hasn’t yet even been planted.  I used my truffle slicer to slice the garlic so thin it partly cooked when it hit the potatoes, but I could have done that with a really sharp paring knife.  The basil was washed and dried, then the leaves were rolled up and sliced thinly.  That’s a chiffonade and is useful for lots of dishes.

You can make a much more beautiful potato salad if you cook the potatoes whole, then make even, thickish slices of them.  I wanted this salad because I was hungry, so I cubed the potatoes before cooking them.  Elegant it is not, but good?  Yep!

Good and good for you!

With slices, arrange them in a pattern on a serving plate, then add the garlic and herb, scattered over them, then drizzle with oil, salt and pepper.

With cubes, drain the cooked potatoes, add the thinly sliced garlic immediately, then toss with some extra virgin olive oil, salt and pepper.  Plate this and scatter the herb over all.  My local dive adds thinnest strips of prosciutto crudo to it, too.  Yes, that’s good too!

How many calories this provides depends on how much oil you use.  It’s completely up to you.  Whatever you decide, as you can see there is nothing in this that will go bad or become harmful if it sits on the picnic blanket for an hour or two.

This doesn’t taste in the least like lovely, mayonnaisey potato salad with crunchy celery and pickle, thinnest bits of onion and wedges of hard cooked egg.  It tastes like itself.  It’s subtler, but really very good.  It’s also something you could leave to a child to make when the kitchen is bustling to ready a barbecue or picnic.

Italian potato salad is never going to replace my old fashioned potato salads, but right now I don’t want those calories and right now seems a good time to get subtle, too.