There are so many ingredients you can add to potato salad. Potatoes are a fairly neutral ingredient that works with a wide range of flavors which is why there are so many delicious variations on potato salad from all over the world. That might be the reason behind one of the recipes from “The Pioneer Woman” Ree Drummond which flips the script on this classic side dish. This isn’t a simple change like substituting yogurt for mayonnaise—it’s a totally out-of-the-box approach to Italian-American flavor bombing. Indeed Drummond’s argument for this recipe is that it’s a departure from the sometimes bland less flavorful traditional versions.
| Channel | Publish Date | Thumbnail & View Count | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|
 AnitaCooks | 2015-07-01 14:56:35 |  598,455 Views |
How to Make Potato Salad – Classic American Potato Salad Recipe
Drummond's recipe which the celebrity chef shared with Us Weekly revolves around four ingredients you might not see in a "traditional" potato salad: mozzarella pepperoni olives and marinara sauce. That said she also mixes in some mayonnaise scallions and herbs like parsley and basil. The olives are probably the closest thing you'll get to a regular mayo-packed potato salad; some recipes call for capers which have a similar salty tangy quality. At some point you could argue that pepperoni is similar to the bacon that's a popular addition to potato salad. As for the mozzarella skip the shredded mozzarella (it's better for hot dishes where it melts) and go for the little pearly balls which work better in salads. Drummond only calls for a modest ¾ cup of marinara sauce; after all you want a dressing not a soggy dish so thick with sauce you need a spoon to spoon it all over.
You could say that Ree Drummond’s potato salad is a kind of adaptation of other dishes to fit the potato salad milieu. It loosely resembles a caprese salad at least if you look closely: mozzarella and basil are big components of the classic as are tomatoes (though caprese salad calls for fresh tomatoes not marinara sauce). But olives don’t really fit into the classic caprese salad (though olive oil does) and neither does pepperoni.
Drummond’s take on potato salad also feels like a combination of ingredients that would work well with pasta salad—after all both rely on a starchy carbohydrate base. While no famous pasta salad recipe calls for this mix of components it’s a fairly popular combination though other versions notably use tomatoes instead of marinara sauce. (Drummond may have opted for sauce because potatoes absorb more liquid than pasta.) Perhaps the closest point of reference is that Drummond borrows elements from classic Italian antipasto platters that also work well with pasta salad. Again marinara sauce is the exception as it’s not actually a component of antipasto though fresh tomatoes can be included.
