The humble potato is hands down my favorite vegetable. It is so versatile. One can prepare the potato in nearly countless variations. Not only can they be prepared in so many ways, they can be processed into flour for bread, distilled into vodka, and or launched from a PVC cannon for fun. At a later date I will go into the history of the potato and why I think sweet potato fries are one of the most pointless objects on the planet. Today I want to talk about potato salad and why it is superior to pasta salad.
It is thought that pasta salad is a bastardization of potato salad and confusion by Americans about what to do with the extra pasta they cooked. Italian immigrants arrived in the United States around the turn of the 20th century a bit after the Germans. The Germans brought potato salad with their biggest wave in the mid 1800’s. It was not much a stretch for people to combine an unfamiliar ingredient into a familiar dish. It accounts for a lot of fusion cooking or experiments home chefs try at home. A lot of the time these turn out great. I have no desire to knock fusion food or people trying to be creative. The problem I have is there should be no left over pasta and if there is just store it with the extra sauce. That's why it was prepared in the first place. Or should have been prepared in the first place.
I understand this was from a different time, when it was probably prepared on a coal or wood stove. It took longer than most people expect for gas stoves to become popular. Reheating leftovers was not easy, let alone boiling water. So I will give the people of the past a pass. However all of you boiling pasta or even worse, overcooking pasta just to make a pasta salad, stop. Please stop. Most of the time all the ingredients besides the pasta make a salad on their own. Please just add them to a green salad instead. It is more refreshing and fewer calories. Which means more room for other goodies at the cookout.
Potato salad on the other hand is an actual side dish. It's a great reason to cook potatoes. It's also an amazing blank canvas. Personally I prefer a lighter potato salad. Vinegar, spicy mustard, cut up hard boiled eggs, onions, and fresh herbs. It's pretty standard. There is no reason you couldn't go fusion on potato salad's ass. A samosa potato salad would be wondrous.
Another important note is that the color and type of potato you use can change up the salad and not just aesthetically, like pointlessly using multi colored pasta. A yukon gold is going to taste differently than a russet. Skin on red potatoes are going to change the texture up a bit. There are also those purple potatoes. I'm not sure they have the right texture for potato salad but they would certainly look cool.
Imagine you are standing around at a cookout eating off a paper plate. On it you have a burger or hot dog. It's your choice, I'm just guiding you through this. You also have something crunchy. Let's say potato chips, because it's okay to double up. Maybe even triple up if you want to spike your lemonade. You also grabbed dessert early because you were afraid the brownies would be gone. Then there is the pasta salad with big chunks of hard mystery cheese, unripe cherry tomatoes, and overcooked pasta. You try and try to skewer a noodle with your fork but it slides around the plate and falls into two before you can get it in your mouth. In the meantime the tomato and cheese are covering your brownie with mayo and making your chips soggy. All because the cheese is too hard and the tomato is unripe. So, please, just say no to pasta salad.