I always thought of this more as a cold-weather kind of dish. But someone suggested it to go along with kielbasi, and it sounded like a great idea. It’s actually easier to make than “regular” potato salad, and is also pretty good cold.
Ingredients
5 pounds red potatoes
2 pounds bacon (see note below)
1 small onion (or part of a large one, use your leftovers)
apple cider vinegar
dark brown sugar
Directions
Set a large pot of salted water on to boil. While that’s coming to a boil, cut the potatoes into bit-sized pieces.
You can peel them first if you want. I don’t mind having the skin there in the finished dish, but you should make sure you cut out any eyes that have started to sprout. The sprouts taste kind of gritty. (Don’t ask how I know.)
Rinse them well in a colander before putting them in the boiling water, then boil until they’re fork tender. Mine took about 15 minutes. It will depend on how small you dice them and what kind of potatoes you got. Drain them in the colander.
Be careful pouring them into the colander. Steam is hot. (This could be your face.)
While the potatoes are cooking, you can get started on the bacon. When I started dicing the bacon, I realized I had grabbed the two-pound pack from the freezer instead of a one-pound pack. “Oops, too much bacon,” I thought to myself. Then I realized how silly that sounded, “Too much bacon.” Can you even use those words in that order?
For some tips on getting better bacon, and how to cook it, take a look at the post on macaroni dinner salad. Cook it and transfer the finished bacon to the same bowl you’re going to put the finished salad in. Pour off most of the fat (filter it and keep it for later) but leave a little in the pan.
Dice the onion and add it to the pan you cooked the bacon in. Sauté until translucent and starting to turn brown.
If you checked out that macaroni salad link above, you noticed I was using a non-stick pan, and this time I’m using stainless steel. Here’s why. When the onion is cooked, deglaze the pan with the cider vinegar. Add enough to coat the entire bottom of the pan, and scrape up all the brown bacony goodness. If you need measurements — and this is definitely not an exact science — it’s a little less than a half cup.
Remove the pan from heat and stir in two or three tablespoons of dark brown sugar.
Add the potatoes and half the bacon back to the pan and toss everything together. Be careful not to smash the potatoes too much.
Don’t worry about getting it perfectly mixed. It’s better to toss it quickly, so all the vinegar doesn’t get absorbed into just one layer of the potatoes.
Transfer the bacon to a smaller serving bowl. As soon as most of the vinegar is absorbed, turn everything out into the bowl. Top with more of the bacon. Serve with the rest of the bacon on the side for people who want even more bacon. (And who doesn’t like even more bacon?)
And that’s it.
This was one of the winning suggestions in the first What Should I Make Next? contest. Contratulations to Kristin, who will be getting her copy of my book later today.
If you’d like to get a free copy for yourself, send me a suggestion at requests@cooklikeyourgrandmother.com. If I make it I’ll send you the eBook when I post the finished recipe. (Click here for request guidelines.)
Want more like this? For more recipes like this, that you can hold right in your hands, and write on, take notes, tear pages out if you want (Gosh, you're tough on books, aren't you?) you might be interested in How To Cook Like Your Grandmother, 2nd edition, Illustrated. Or to learn your way around the kitchen, check out Starting From Scratch: The Owner's Manual for Your Kitchen.
Subscribe to comments on this post
40 Comments
It’s interesting to add brown sugar, but sounds like it’s good! Thanks for sharing. I like your explanations in the recipe. Btw, I came here through Recipemuncher.
Awesome, I was hoping to start seeing people from there. So far it looks like Recipemuncher and Foodgawker have picked up most of the old Tastespotter crowd.
Mom used to make this for my stepfather, sans the brown sugar but with mayo like regular potato salad, and served cold with plenty of fresh ground black pepper. The vinegar was definitely the secret ingredient. I’m curious about trying it without the mayo now.
I just “Stumbled” this extremely short video on how to quick peel an egg. I can’t wait to try it! If it works, I’ll be in boiled egg heaven! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dut1b–AgLM
This is the hotness! It looks good! What are you going to do with that bacon fat? I have a cousin who makes flavored popcorn using grease from things we’ve cooked: fish, chicken, bacon. It’s wild and crazy!
Genie, if that works I’m going to annoy everyone I know for the next couple of weeks. “Hey, check this out! It’s so cool!”
Nikki, if I’m sautéing, odds are it’s bacon fat I’m using.
nice recipes
jasmine celion
cool-hotstuff.blogspot.com
Wheee! Drew made me famous! And also, hungry for bacon.
“too much bacon”? does not compute.
there is no way for potatoes + bacon to be bad. yum.
i actually just posted a bacon storage tip that allowed you to moderate your bacon usage, for those who continue in the misguided opinion that “too much bacon” is feasible.
Michelle, check out my pasta carbonara. It’s pretty close to your pasta and bacon dish.
This looks so yummy! I stumbled upon this recipe…as I Stumble upon your blog quite often. I would love to give this a try!
Angie
Angie, let me know how it comes out.
Great-looking potato salad! I love potato salads, though not always the creamy kind. This one looks like a keeper.
Thanks for sharing. Bookmarking this one.
js, I agree with not liking the creamy ones. Even when I do it with mayo it’s very nearly dry. I hate the store-bought ones that are almost soup. Uggh.
WOW! I made this for dinner tonight and served it hot with locally made farm sausage (sliced on the bias and browned the iron skillet I had made the potato salad mixture in). What a fabulous potato salad this is. Thank you! The cider vinegar and brown sugar is much better than other versions I’ve had with white vinegar and white sugar. So much more dimension to the flavors.
I made one addition: green beans. I used frozen haricots verts (small, skinny French green beans), and chopped them sort of smallish, added them to the boiling potatoes to cook and everything ended up in the salad together. We liked it and it was a nice splash of color without going off-theme.
This weekend I had a potato salad at a friend’s house that had fresh, diced cucumber in it. Some German dishes have cucumber cooked in bacon fat with sweet vinegar, so that might be another interesting variation as well.
This is always my favorite kind of comment! Nothing quite like hearing from someone who liked what they made after reading something here.
By the way, the green beans sound good, but I’m not so sure about the cucumbers. Although, you kind of caught my attention with the “cooked in bacon fat” part.
Cucumbers DO make an excellent hot soup. Reminiscent of potato soup but much thinner, of course.
nice recipe, i like it.
sure sounds like a nice recipe, but it’s not a genuine german recipe. sounds more like a eavily modified bavarian “warm potato salad”. but who cares as long as it is good.
Frank (german guy)
Frank, I think what we call “German potato salad” is about as authentically German as “French fries” are authentically French. In other words, not much. But like you said, taste beats authenticity every time.
That’s an incomplete recipe you forgot the hard boiled eggs that particular potato salad is half assed without the chopped hard boiled eggs included otherwise it is just a potato salad hold the mayo.
SoaM, you might prefer my other potato salad recipe. That’s the old-fashioned version with egg. This one, however, is German potato salad, which I’ve never personally seen made with egg.
Just to check if my experience was unusual, I Googled for german potato salad and checked everything on the first page of results. I did find a couple versions that included the eggs. However there were more than 30 — several of the links on Google were to lists of multiple recipes — that did not include eggs. So I think I’m in pretty good company here.
Thanks for the feedback.
This is pretty much identical to the way I make German Potato Salad. And I LOVE it along-side bratwurst with spicy mustard and sauerkraut! YUM!
Brandi, I should like sauerkraut. I like the cabbage with corned beef and cabbage. I like the version of cole slaw at a local restaurant that’s mostly cabbage, vinegar and pepper. I like German potato salad. (Obviously.) But I’ve never had sauerkraut that I like.
Drew,
Stumbled upon this site and read that you haven’t found a sauerkraut that you liked. Me either. Until my Hungarian cousin taught me to start it off by sauteeing onions in bacon fat. Sounds good, right? Then add sugar to taste ( I use brown) and toss in the sauerkraut. Mix it all together and it’s delish. I actually took leftovers in my lunch the next day.
Any recipe that starts with bacon can’t be all bad.
Drew,
Just wanted to let you know I made your recipe and loved it! I posted a picture and referenced your site on my blog creatinginthekitchen.blogspot.com. Thanks for the great recipe!
Kristie
Holy crap that looks awesome. I'm going to give this a try tomorrow
And it's been almost a year since I made it. Time to do it again, I suppose.
just stumbled onto this page and this looks heavenly. bacon? check. potatoes? check. brown sugar? check.
sounds like a great recipe to me.
only thing i can think of to make it more German is to add beer into it somehow.. hmm perhaps beer-boiled potatoes? or I could go the easy route and do beer brats.
hmm….
You can always add the beer to the cook while the potatoes are boiling.
this is a traditional family dish for me, i like adding diced green peppers as well verrry yummy.
Looks good. I've been making German potato salad very similar for years, however I also add green olives (no pimentos) and let them simmer down with the vinegar.
In my opinion, sauerkraut should be served hot off of the stovetop, not microwaved. I add a big glob of bacon fat (unfiltered) to the pot of sauerkraut before heating it. Adds a great flavor.
The last time I made it for a picnic I still coudnt figure out what it was missing. It almost needs something green. I saw this morning online that authentic german potato salad is actually cooked with broth and sometimes people add cucmbers. Not sure what green to add (celery to crunchy (unless cook in bacon grease), peppers seems like theyd be to sweet) Any suggestions?
Maybe some chives, mixed in after it’s cooked.
Hi,
i’m from Germany, espec. bavaria and i tell you, this is no german Potato Salad, i don’t know what it is, but i surely know it is not a potato salad.
Thomas, that’s an interesting way to put it. It’s clearly potato salad, I don’t see how you can say it’s not.
But it is German potato salad? Well, we have Spanish rice, and Irish coffee, and French fries, and I doubt any of them are “authentic” in any meaningful way. I know for a fact that at least the French fries are a purely American invention. (The name, that is. The actual food probably originated in Belgium.)
So what’s your recipe for authentic Bavarian potato salad?
Bavarians are very particular about their potato salad! I have a recipe from my german mother-in-law. She is from the Stuttgart area. No bacon etc in the potato salad. But I think up North they do have a different recipe.
Hi Sarah, Stuttgart is not in Bavaria, but Baden-Württemberg. Small difference
Classic Bavarian potato salad is made of potatoes, onions, vinegar, oil, water, sugar, salt, pepper and sometimes chives.
Servus, Andreas
Sarah, any chance of sharing that recipe? I promise I won’t tell anyone … except the 130 thousand or so that read the blog each month.
One Trackback
[...] not it. I’ve also got the final shots that put it all together: chicken and kielbasi, German potato salad, deviled eggs, salad (from our guests) and lemonade.You ready? Make sure you’re not leaning [...]