Mastering the mysteries of potato salad

For our Christmas Day buffet, I made potato salad. It was a great success, and I was looking forward to eating the leftovers on Boxing Day - but it was so cold and wet I didn't feel like it, and bought a supermarket pouch of soup instead (because I can't be bothered making any). Still, I learnt a lot of interesting things in pursuit of potato salad mastery, so I thought I'd share the essentials with you, plus a recipe,  because today the sun is out and it feels like salad weather again.

1. Good potato salad requires potatoes that are neither under-cooked nor over-cooked. Starting the potatoes in boiling water is a bad idea, because the outside overcooks before the inside is even warm. So always start the potatoes in cold water.
2. Adding 1 tablespoon of rice or white vinegar per litre of cooking water, as well as salt, both seasons the potatoes and helps to prevent over-cooking.
3. Because potato salad is eaten cold, it needs more seasoning than potatoes served hot. Adding more some seasoning to the hot drained potatoes is much more effective than waiting until they're cold.
4. Mayonnaise needs to be added later when the potatoes are cold, and you can add a bit more vinegar at this stage too, along with pepper.

If you really want to know every detail of the science behind all this, complete with the cellular construction of potatoes and pictures using green dye to show how seasoning gets in, go here.
The Food Lab guy's final word:

Two tablespoons of vinegar in the cooking water, another to dress the hot potatoes, and a final two in the mayonnaise mixture add plenty of layered brightness. Mayonnaise—be it storebought or homemade—is a must... By stirring the salad vigorously, you can bash off the corners of the potatoes, which get mashed up and extend the amount of creamy dressing to tender potato chunks. For heat I add a few tablespoons of whole grain mustard.

Okay, so here's my NZ adaptation of the 'Classic Potato Salad' recipe provided by Serious Eats to go with the lab report:

1.5 kg smallish boiling potatoes
2 litres cold water
2 Tbsps salt
2 Tbsps sugar
2 Tbsps rice or white vinegar

Add potatoes, salt, sugar and vinegar to water in a large saucepan. Bring to boil, reduce to a slow boil and cook until done (test for doneness after about 10 minutes' slow boiling - mine took about 20 minutes to cook through). Drain, peel and cut into chunks (not too small or they'll go mushy).

2 Tbsps vinegar

Transfer warm cut up potatoes to rimmed baking sheet. Spread into an even layer, then sprinkle with vinegar. Allow to cool to room temperature, about 30 minutes.

·                          

·      Add extras according to preference - the quantities depend on how many potatoes you're using, but the potatoes should prevail:
      
      Original recipe
      Finely diced celery

·           Finely diced red onion

·           Finely sliced green parts of spring onions
      1/4 cup chopped cornichons (tiny gherkins)
      Finely chopped Italian parsley
     
      Some NZ extras or alternatives:
      Hard-boiled eggs, chopped
      Corn kernels (cut from a cob microwaved for 3 minutes)
      Finely diced shallots (milder than the red onion)
      Capers instead of cornichons
      Finely chopped fresh chives

Mix gently into cut up potatoes, then add:
      Bought or home-made mayonnaise 
      (Not too much, it shouldn't be overwhelming. For super-easy home-made mayonnaise, go here. I made it with the finely chopped garlic, but leave that out if you don't like it.)

Taste and mix in gently, according to preference:
      Grainy mustard
      A little more vinegar or a little lemon juice

Chill for a few hours or overnight - take out of fridge an hour before serving.

Those who know my blog well will recognise that once again, I took the photo only after we'd eaten most of the potato salad!

A good gratin

This time last Saturday I was feeling nervous. A friend had been given, and had passed on to me, a beautiful piece of sirloin cut into thick steaks. (Actually I wasn't quite sure if they were indeed sirloin steaks, but I took them up to the legendary Gipps St Butcher to make sure.) I was charged with cooking them for him and his partner, two more friends, and me and my son (who is visiting from China).

           I don't deal with meat like this every day. I haven't even tried to take their photo - meat is notoriously hard to show looking good. But I did make a rather good potato gratin to go with them, plus a salad.

            Gratin takes a bit of trouble to make, but it's really good for dinner parties because all the fiddly stuff can be done well in advance. It cooks quietly in the oven and sits there obediently waiting until you've dealt with the steak and salad. It also looks very nice on the table.

             The classic is gratin dauphinois, made with milk, cream and sometimes Gruyere cheese. But I thought its humbler cousin, gratin savoyard, would be better with the steaks. It's made with stock, a little butter and, in my case, a little wine as well.

               

Gratin savoyard 
(adapted from Richard Ehrlich's recipe in The Lazy Cook)

500g Agria potatoes, preferably even in size, oval-shaped and small enough to go, peeled, through the feed-in tube of the food processor

2 large cloves garlic

250ml good chicken stock (I've taken to using Simon Gault's squeezable plastic sachets of concentrated stock, made up with hot water.)

100ml dry white wine

30g butter

Set oven to 180C.

Peel and crush the garlic. Peel the potatoes and feed them through the slicing disc of a food processor.
(If you haven't got a processor, and don't want to spend a long time trying to get even thin slices, cut them into roughly even chunks about 1cm square.)

Butter a large round or square ceramic oven dish. Spread an even layer of overlapping slices (or a layer of chunks) into the dish. Season very lightly with salt and pepper and scatter over tiny bits of garlic. Repeat until the potatoes and garlic have all been used up and the dish is close to full. It helps to select and keep back a layer of nice even slices for the top. Dot the top with small bits of butter.

Reduce the white wine by half in a small saucepan. Prepare the stock. Mix the two together, tasting to check that it's not too salty.

Pour enough liquid over the potatoes to come a little way up the sides. Reserve any left in case the potatoes start to dry out too much during cooking.

Put a layer of foil over the potatoes, dull side uppermost. Cook for 50 minutes. 

Remove the foil. Check dryness, adding a little more liquid if necessary.

Cook for another 10-20 minutes, until the top is turning a little brown and crisp, and a thin knife or skewer slides easily down through the potatoes to the bottom of the dish.

I turned the oven down to warm and put the gratin on the bottom shelf while I made the salad and prepared the steaks (taken out of the fridge and patted dry when I first put in the potatoes) with a brush of oil, and a light sprinkle of salt. Then I lined them up under the fan grill and cooked them just until they were no longer really soft, but definitely not really firm either. (Sirloin does need a little more cooking than fillet, I think.)

            We didn't need much else - well, just a little antipasto beforehand, with some cheese, a lemon tart and a few chocolates after, courtesy of my guests, not to mention some very fine wine from the steak provider... a Saturday night feast of food and friendship.

Pretty potatoes

 I've been buying bags of big fat dirt-covered Agria potatoes lately. Apparently potatoes keep better when they're still covered in dirt (and they tend to be cheaper than nicely washed ones). Usually I peel Agrias, but every so often I want to bake them with their skins on. Last year I bought a handy little book called Splendid Spuds, and in it was a recipe I've been wanting to try for a while, for Hasselback Potatoes. Named after the venerable Stockholm restaurant, Hasselbacken, that first served them in the 1940s, they're a traditional favourite in the USA. They look and taste wonderful, but they're very simple to make. Here's the Huffington Post raving about them recently:

"What emerges is a bit of a cooking miracle - LOTS of crispy edges, soft interior, toppings in every bite. Our only concern is that we haven't made more of these in our lifetime."

Hasselback potatoes (adapted from Splendid Spuds)
This serves four people with 1 potato per person - if you want more potatoes, just use more butter, and they might also take a little longer to cook..

4 smooth oval medium-size Agria potatoes, scrubbed clean but not peeled
1 Tbsp soft butter (approx. - a bit more does no harm)
salt and pepper

Set oven to 230C (or 220C fan forced).
Cut each potato in even 5cm slashes, almost through to the bottom but not quite. 
(The Huffington Post has an excellent tip: line up the handle of a long wooden spoon alongside each potato as you cut, so that the knife won't go right through. It helps to use a longer knife rather than a short vege knife.)
Pat tops of potatoes dry with paper towel and arrange them cut side up in an oiled metal baking dish.
Spread potatoes with half of the butter and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Bake for 15 minutes, then spread with remaining butter and bake for another 15-20 minutes. 

We gobbled ours up before I remembered to take a photo, and anyway by then it was night time and my dinner photos rarely come out well. 
But for once mine looked exactly like the picture in the book.

Rich and rustic: pork and potatoes

Wellington has been absolutely, positively freezing for a week. So when I saw some nice pork chops at the butcher's, I thought it was time to revive a dinner I haven't made for years: Elizabeth David's pork chops baked with potatoes, or if you prefer, Terrine de Porc (though it isn't, of course, what we would usually think of as a terrine at all).

Her instructions (which are always a little vague - I've spelt them out a bit more) are to cook it in a ceramic dish in "a very slow oven" for three hours, so I thought it would work  even better in a slow cooker - and it does. But the oven would be fine too. It looks like a long recipe, but it takes very little time to put together.

Pork chops baked with potatoes 

(adapted from French Provincial Cooking, first published in 1960 and probably her best book from a cook's point of view)

4 pork chops

2 large cloves garlic

8 juniper berries

Olive oil or pork fat (I had some duck fat so I used that)

700g Agria potatoes

1 onion

150g thinly sliced shoulder or middle bacon

1 small glass white wine or cider (about 125g)

salt and pepper

parsley to serve

Put the slow cooker on to high, or the oven on to 150C.

Make a little slit in the meat alongside the bone of each pork chop. Push in half a clove of garlic, sliced lengthways, and two juniper berries. Brown the pork chops on each side in a little fat or oil, and set aside.

Peel the potatoes and slice them evenly and as thinly as possible (a food processor does this very well).

Peel and thinly slice the onion.

Arrange half the potatoes on the bottom of the slow cooker dish or in a large, deep ceramic oven dish with a lid.

Strew half the sliced onions on top.

Place the chops on top of the onions and potatoes.

Cover the chops with the rest of the onions, then the potatoes. Season lightly with salt and pepper.

Lay the bacon slices neatly over the top to cover everything. Pour over the white wine or cider.

(I was making this for two, so it looks a bit smaller - I used 2 chops, less bacon, about 2/3 of the potatoes, and the other ingredients stayed the same.)

Place a layer of kitchen paper, folded double, between the dish and the lid.

Slow cooker: either turn the temperature down to low and cook for 6 hours, or cook on high for 4 hours and on low for another 1-2 hours.

Oven: Cook for 3 to 3 and a half hours.

The cooking time depends on how thick the potato slices and pork chops are. To see if everything is cooked, gently push a thin sharp knife down through the layers. It should go in quite easily, meeting only slight resistance.

When it's cooked, grasp the dish firmly and carefully pour any remaining liquid into a bowl. This will be mainly fat from the chops.

Serve hot, on hot plates, with other veges on the side (though the French would probably eat these as a separate course). Sprinkle finely chopped parsley over the top (only I didn't go out to get any, it was too cold and wet).

That chop looks pinkish not because it's undercooked, but because the bacon seems to give it a bit of colour. "This is heavy, rustic food", says Elizabeth, "but the flavour is delicious." It is too - totally satisfying on a winter evening. Any leftover potatoes are excellent gently fried up for breakfast with an egg or a little sausage. 

Tarted up for lunch

I had a brilliant time in Tauranga - you can see some pix on Elsewoman - and it's been very busy since I got back. On Wednesday Harvey's brother Bruce and sister-in-law Margaret came up for the day from Methven to see him, so I wanted to make something tasty for lunch. I remembered a very good Harriet Harcourt recipe for potato, brie and onion tart. It's from a book called Mission for Entertaining, a fundraiser for Wellington City Mission, with a great collection of recipes from the capital's top chefs, caterers, restaurateurs, food retailers and food writers.
          A friend gave it to me for Christmas two years ago, and it's proved very useful. It has one excellent feature which is notably lacking in every one of the lavish new celebrity cookbooks I've looked at recently. There are no pictures, but the recipes are clearly printed in black on white, so you can read them easily while you're cooking.
           Now isn't that a novel idea! Without exception, the new books by Jamie, Nigella, Annabel et al. feature coloured or grey type, often in quite a small font size, printed on coloured backgrounds or even over photos, making the recipes difficult and in some cases impossible to read. Obviously the designers don't cook - or at any rate, not from these books. And I won;t be cooking from them either.
             So, to the tart. I cooked the potatoes and the onions the night before, making it very quick to assemble next day. And (forgive me, Harriet) I added a bit of chopped lean bacon on top as well, because I had some and thought it would be good - and it was. This is more substantial than the usual quiche, so it worked very well for hungry people who'd left home about 5 am to get here.

Potato, onion and brie tart (slightly adapted from Harriet Harcourt's recipe - hers serves six, mine serves four)

Two sheets of savoury shortcrust pastry
About six small gourmet potatoes, each cut into 4-6 even chunks depending on size (no need to peel them)
2 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil
2 large onions (or more small ones) thinly sliced
2 cloves garlic, crushed
2 Tbsp fresh thyme leaves
2 Tbsp grainy mustard
125g round of brie, cut into smallish chunks (I sliced it in half horizontally before cutting it up, and didn't use it all because I had bacon as well)
2 rashers of lean bacon cut into small pieces (optional)
2 large eggs
150 ml creme fraiche
salt and pepper

*Heat oven to 200C and lightly butter a 27 cm flan dish (I use one with a loose bottom)
*Use one sheet of pastry to line the flan dish and the other, cut into strips, to join to the edges and neatly cover the sides of the dish. Put the pastry lined dish into the fridge for 15 minutes. (I used to skip this bit, until I discovered that the pastry then shrank down the sides of the dish and didn't hold the filling properly.)
* Put potatoes in a pan of cold water, bring to the boil and cook for 8-10 minutes until just cooked. Drain and allow to cool slightly.
* Gently heat oil in a non-stick frypan, add onion and cook gently for 2-3 minutes until soft. Add crushed garlic and half the thyme leaves and cook for another 3 minutes. Take off the heat and leave to cool slightly.
* Take pastry lined dish out of fridge and spread the mustard over the base.
* Spread the onions over the mustard.

* Scatter over the pieces of potato, then add the pieces of brie and (if using) the bacon.
* Beat together the eggs and creme fraiche, season with salt and pepper, and pour carefully over tart.



* Sprinkle with the rest of the thyme and bake for 25 minutes until golden and set.
* Serve warm with a simple salad.