American-style potato salad, thickly dressed with mayonnaise and sweet pickle relish, is archetypal picnic fare and will always have a place on summer tables. But we’ve cooked (and eaten) piles of it over the years, and these days we yearn for something lighter and fresher to serve with grilled fish, chicken and even meat.
In our mind, French potato salad is just the ticket. Having little in common with its American counterpart, French potato salad is served warm or at room temperature and is composed of sliced potatoes glistening with olive oil, white wine vinegar and plenty of fresh herbs.
We expected quick success with this seemingly simple recipe – how hard could it be to boil a few potatoes and toss them in vinaigrette? We sliced the hot potatoes, dressed them while they were still warm (warm potatoes are more absorbent than cool ones), and then served them up to our tasters.
The salad looked mangled, as the warm potatoes consistently broke apart upon slicing. We had chosen not to peel the potatoes for the sake of convenience and beauty, but the potato skins inevitably tore, leaving unsightly streaks.
And the salad didn’t taste much better than it looked. Despite an assertively seasoned vinaigrette, the potatoes themselves were uniformly bland. Another irksome point was that it was hard to tell when the potatoes were done. Unevenly sized potatoes made it difficult to avoid some over- or undercooked potatoes in the finished dish. This wasn’t going to be as easy as we thought.