Potato Salad with Roasted Garlic and Cilantro Aioli

Try as I might, I can’t get this potato salad to look like something better than potato salad. Guess what, potato salad is delicious, and we have featured a recipe or two here once before. What better to honor our one year anniversary than to make a potato salad and batten down the Berkeley winter hatches. After all, don’t we need to store fat for hibernating through this winter? Nooooo? You say we’re not cave people anymore?

Making your own mayonnaise obviously elevates this to a new level of doing dishes and doing DELICIOUS. It’s not hard, it mainly just takes up nearly all of your olive oil. Omega-3s forever. Let’s move to Santorini.

MAYO:

1 egg

2 tablespoons lemon juice (I like this pretty lemony)

salt and pepper

2 tablespoons horseradish mustard

1/4 cup Roasted Garlic Oil (err, you can buy some from the company that I work for or you can just sautee whole cloves in olive oil until they turn roasty then store that in a jar somewhere dark for a week or your fridge for practically forever)

3/4 cup olive oil

1 small, sweet onion, cut up

1/4 cup cilantro

1/8 tsp cayenne pepper

You’re going to need to make the mayo first, so here goes: blend egg with lemon juice or pulse in a food processor for about 10 seconds. Then, with the blender or food processor running, drizzle in the oils (I had the garlic oil and olive oil in a 1-cup measuring cup together) very sloooowlly so as not to break the emulsion, and go 4-5 seconds longer after you’ve drizzled if you are using a food processor. Then add in salt, pepper, cayenne pepper. Pulse or blend for a few seconds more. Add the onion in, pulse or blend. Add the cilantro in. Pulse or blend for a few seconds until incorporated. I used a food processor, and my final mixture was pretty runny but tasty. I ended up adding a bit more salt to it at the end, so taste it and see if you like it. Scoop into a container and refrigerate for 30 minutes to let everything mold together.

If you break the emulsion, I’m pretty sure you can add a few drops of water to the mixture in the blender or food processor then pulse and it’ll whip right back together again, or so my dim recollection of Harold McGee tips tells me.

THE POTATO PART OF THIS SALAD:

You will need—

2 lbs + of new potatoes

1 celery stalk, peeled and diced

3 hard boiled eggs, chopped

4 small sweet pickles or 1/2 dill pickle chopped into mini cubes

Quick pour of sweet pickle juice (so bad on its own but so good here)

Quick pour of dill pickle juice

1 green onion, white parts only, finely chopped

Steam the potatoes whole in a large pot for about 20-24 minutes. I know when they’re done when I stick a fork in them (really) and they easily, but not too easily, go through to the end of the fork tine. Take them out, put on a cutting board, let cool for a few minutes, then cut them into quarters. Add to bowl, mix in celery, hard boiled eggs, pickles, pickle juice, green onion. Once nearly completely cool, stir in the mayo that you made, tablespoon by tablespoon. You may have some left over. It’s good to taste it as you make it so you can see if you like the consistency, but the flavor really will come later. Add more salt if you need it and more pepper. You may need to add a dash of white sugar to counterbalance the acid. Let cool a bit more, then cover and let marinate in the fridge for 30-60 minutes.

- Nellie