I want to make German potato salad to go with the Kassler Ripchen (smoked pork chops) I bought for dinner tonight. I’ve never made this dish and I only have vague memories of a German potato salad I ate once many years ago. I do have a recipe I looked up online, and to my surprise, the dressing wasn’t an oil and vinegar one; it was kind of a thickened pan sauce made with bacon fat, onions, water, and vinegar.
What’s the deal? Is this a typical German potato salad recipe? Or do you advise starting from an oil and vinegar base?
What I know as a “German potato salad” is a warm potato salad, made with bacon, onion, and vinegar. I’m sure there are many more varieties, but that’s what is usually associated with “German potato salad,” at least here in the US, in my experience.
Yep, the online recipe resulted in a salad that tastes very much like my distant memory.
Into a bit of the bacon fat left after frying bacon, you stir in onions and fry them a bit, then add flour to make a roux, then add water and apple cider vinegar and a bit of sugar. Whisk it to make a runny sauce, turn off the heat, and add sliced cooled potatoes and the crumbled reserved bacon. Serve warmish but not hot.
It was delectable with smoked pork chops and some Hofbrau House beer.
Right. When talking about a roux, a lot of people just say ‘fat’ rather than differentiating between bacon fat, sausage fat, meat drippings, vegetable oil, butter, etc. So the dressing really was ‘oil and vinegar’, for a certain value of ‘oil’.
I made GPS from an online recipe, and it turned out great. I’ll have to find it again and file it in my German recipes folder.
You can also fry some of the potatoes in the bacon grease for a while, besides improving the flavor it will release enough starch that you don’t need to add flour to thicken the sauce. Even without any thickening stirring the potatoes in the sauce should be sufficient. I add some chopped red and green bell peppers to German potato salad, mainly for the color.
There are a lot of people who hate the stuff and consider it inferior to the incredibly bland mixture of white on white potato salad. That’s a sign you can ignore their opinion on any food subject, and usually most other subjects as well.
ETA: German potato salad should be served hot. It’s okay cold, but the flavor doesn’t really come through.
It wasn’t that one. I probably got it from foodnetwork or allrecipes, but neither of those show that I visited the links I found. I’m pretty sure the recipe I found used white vinegar, and I’m not entirely sure I made a roux. I’ll try to remember to make some pork and potato salad when it cools off in a few months. (With temperatures in the high-70s to mid-to-upper-80s, I’ve pretty much been banned from using the oven. And Mrs. L.A. doesn’t like ‘heavy’ food when it’s hot.)
