Meiko Temple of 'Meiko and the Dish' makes Southern Potato Salad—the dish she's bringing to the Black History Month Virtual Potluck this year.
For the past few years in celebration of Black History Month, Meiko (Meiko and the Dish) and Aaron (The Hungry Hutch) have coordinated a virtual potluck, where 28 Black food bloggers contribute original recipes from the vast African diaspora. This year, our podcast's bringing a few dishes to the table—listen in and cook along with us.
On Play Me a Recipe, your favorite cooks will walk you through their most treasured recipes, offering all the insider tips, stories, and tricks you won't get from a written recipe—and you'll be right alongside them, every step of the way. Feel free to pause, jump back, or navigate the steps via the podcast chapters.
If you're cooking along, here's the recipe we're making today. Go ahead and grab the ingredients below (Meiko starts listing them at 2:32) before starting the episode.
Check out the 37 other recipes by Black food bloggers here!
Lobby Time Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
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Meiko Temple: That to me is the perfect potato salad, right? That sinkability.
(musical interlude)
Meiko: Hey y'all, this is Play Me A Recipe. It's your girl Meiko Temple, blogger, recipe developer, and food photographer over at Meikoandthedish.com. I'm also the organizer of the Black History Month Virtual Potluck, a round up of Black food blogger recipes that I'm sharing on Food52's website right now, so go check it out.
Today, I am going to be showing you guys my contribution to the virtual potluck: Southern potato salad. Just remember, the recipe is linked in the show notes if you need to refer to it, but otherwise we'll be preparing the entire recipe together. So feel free to pause or jump back if you need to hear an instruction over again or need a little more time. All right, let's get started.
As I mentioned, I'm the organizer behind the Black History Month Virtual Potluck, which is an annual roundup of Black food bloggers contributing diasporic recipes in honor of Black History Month. We started the annual collaboration back in 2017 for a couple reasons. We did it as a means to bring awareness to an often overlooked voice in culinary media, to share and learn about Black foodways and the diversity of food traditions, and finally, to drive inclusivity by encouraging everyone to embrace our recipes and celebrate Black culinary contributions. This year's potluck is incredible and has so many delicious recipes. Entrées like peanut curry-braised ribs from Britney Breaks Bread, and homemade Cajun andouille sausage with shrimp and grits from the husband and wife blogging duo Cooks With Soul...I mean, inventive sides like suya-spiced brussels sprouts from the blogger Dash Of Jazz. And let me tell you something: when I saw the passion fruit coconut layer cake from A Classic Twist Blog, I almost fell out. (laughs)
Okay, I personally went with a Southern classic potato salad, because when it comes to Black family cookouts, Sunday suppers, church functions or holidays, it's one of the top revered dishes, right alongside mac and cheese, fried chicken, peach cobbler and maybe deviled eggs, right? (laughs) It's so serious, y'all, that most Black families specifically assign someone to potato salad duty, and it has to be someone who's tried and tested, okay? Their recipe has to be legit. And in my family, the torch has been passed to my sister Mercedes. So I gave her a call right before this podcast to make sure that I got all the deets on the family recipe so that I can share them with you.
Meiko: For this recipe, you'll need five pounds of russet potatoes cleaned and peeled. I'm still chopping up my potatoes so we'll do all that together. (laughs) 32 ounces of chicken stock. I like to use low sodium so that I can control my salt. You'll need two tablespoons plus 1 1/2 teaspoons of kosher salt, so leave those two measurements separate. You'll need a bay leaf and a total of five hard boiled eggs. So four of those eggs I want peeled and diced. The fifth, I want peeled and refrigerated. You'll need two medium stalks of celery, one cup of sweet relish. All right, and I know I'm about to get some flak here, but listen, the truth needs to be told, okay? 1 1/2 cups of Miracle Whip. Okay? Miracle Whip, I said it. It's out there. (laughs) We will talk more about the types of mayo used in potato salad, but let's continue with the rest of the ingredients. You'll need a third cup of yellow mustard, two tablespoons of hot sauce, a nice blend of seasonings that includes 1 1/2 teaspoons of garlic powder, 1 1/2 teaspoons of onion powder, 1/2 a teaspoon of celery seed, plus a little bit more to garnish on top later, and 1 1/2 teaspoons of black pepper, and your last two seasonings are paprika and green onion for garnish.
Meiko: The tools that you're gonna need for this recipe are a medium pot, a large bowl, a small bowl, a colander to drain those potatoes, a sheet pan, a mixing spoon, a masher or wooden spoon, and a handy dandy chef knife.
(musical interlude)
Meiko: So first things first. We need to get our potatoes together. So I'm starting off with russet potatoes that have been cleaned, and they should be peeled but I still have one more left to peel. So I'm gonna do that with you guys. You can use a traditional peeler. I'm actually using a paring knife the way my grandma Jesse taught me to. I remember watching her during the holidays, and it was so fascinating. She would whip these potatoes and peel them off, and she would literally go around the entire potato without the peel breaking. (laughs) I'm still trying to get to her level of amazingness. I'm not there yet, y'all, but we're always striving to be better. So that's what I'm striving for, because I feel like once I can peel an entire potato without the skin breaking I'm a true culinarian and that's it, period. (laughs)
So I'm still peeling off my skin, and as I'm cleaning up the last bits of skin off of my potato, I'll tell you a little bit why I like to use russet potatoes. So I use russet or actually, Yukon Gold. Those are dryer varieties that, when boiled, they actually are more crumbly in texture. And that crumble or disintegration of the potato helps create a very creamy mixture that helps blend and meld all of the seasoning and flavors together. And a real good Southern potato salad ain't nothing but a good old balance of flavors, honey. So that is what is necessary, is a good Yukon gold or russet potato. And today I'm using russet potatoes.
Alright, and this potato is humongous. Alright, I'm gonna get all my peel into a garbage container and get this potato ready to get cubed. And I like to cube my potatoes into about half inch cubes, so let's go ahead and get started. I'll tell you exactly how I like to chop it.
Okay, so now that the skin is all removed, what I like to do is stabilize my potato on a cutting board. I cut long ways down the center. Then I turn one half of the potato onto its flat side, and I'll do long cuts two times down that potato. One, two. That should create three different segments of the potato. Then I'll flip it 90 degrees and I'll do about half inch chops down the potato, and I'll do that on both sides of my potatoes. (chopping sounds)
At this point I like to kind of inspect the potato, and if it's more of a rectangle than a square, then I'll do another chop just to get it nice and cubed. That's just me being anal about it. You don't have to necessarily do that. They will cook completely without doing that. But I do like to make sure that they're all cubed. Okay, I'm gonna do a couple runs through these potatoes, make sure everything is looking good. Then, after my potatoes are chopped, I like to add them to water. If I left them out, they'll oxidize and turn brown and yucky looking. And that's not cute, honey, so. (laughs) What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna add them to the rest of my potatoes, which are sitting in a bowl of water. Here we go. Okay. The water will not only keep it from oxidizing, but also helps get rid of some of the excess starch from the potato. Then what I'll do is I'll go and get ready for the next step, which is getting my broth together.
I actually like to use chicken broth to prepare my potatoes. It's another way to impart flavor in an otherwise bland and flavorless potato. I went the easy route and got a low sodium store-bought version. But, honey, if you're making your own chicken broth, kudos to you! That is gonna be an extra special potato salad. I'm going to add my broth to my pot.
Also, my broth is chilled. Anytime you're boiling potatoes, you're gonna want to use chilled liquid. That's going to ensure that your potatoes cook evenly. (pouring sound) That's about 32 ounces. I wait until I add my potatoes to see if I need any more liquid. So let me go and strain my potatoes now in a colander and then I'll be back, add them to the pot and see where we are. (splashing sound)
Okay, so my potatoes are drained. I'm gonna add them to my medium pot with the chicken stock. Okay, so once all the potato's in, I like to kind of give it a check, and I check to see where that water is sitting. Right now, my water is barely covering the potatoes, so I like to have about an inch of liquid above that. So I'm just gonna get some cold water and add it to the top.
Now that my liquid is where I want it to be I want to add the last ingredients from my broth. And I'm gonna add two tablespoons of salt. Okay. I'm gonna add a bay leaf. I'm gonna give it all a stir. Perfect. Just a quick one. I'm gonna turn my heat toe high, put a lid on top and let that come to a boil. Once my potatoes come to a boil, I'm going to remove my lid and turn my heat down to medium.
All right. It's been about four minutes, and I can see my pot is already boiling. I'm going to remove the lid on and reduce my heat down to medium. Give everything a little stir. That calms down the boiling just a little bit. Okay. Now, I want these potatoes to cook in total for about 13 to 15 minutes. So at the 13 minute mark, I'm gonna come back and check to see if they're done.
I'm gonna let the potato salad do its thing. But while it's doing that, I'll just chat with you guys for a little bit. Um, one thing that has always made me wonder is why Black folk like myself hold potato salad in such high regard. You know, potato salad is Germanic in origin, it's not something that really dates back to, you know, Africa, per se, but with a little research--and what's great about the Black History Month virtual potluck, is it really creates a forum to do that research amongst other people who are interested in the same thing. So I love how much I learn every year. But one of the things that came about during my research was that German immigrants and enslaved Blacks or African-Americans would have social relations, economic relations. They would buy and sell from one another. They would have festivals that they celebrate things with one another. And so it's no surprise when knowing that factoid, that we would have embraced a recipe that is Germanic in its origin or roots. Um, that's super interesting to me, considering this all happened during a time that was very, very divided. So very interesting factoid. Really helps me understand more about our love and appreciation for potato salad, and how we've made it our own. (laughs)
We are now approaching the 13 minute mark. I'm going to give this potato salad what I'd like to call the fork tender test. So I'm going to take a fork and I'm going to grab a potato. Now what I want to do is see how much resistance I get when I press into the potato. If the fork slides in but hold its body, that is a good potato that is ready to move on to the next step. Mine happens to be a good potato. It is ready to go. I'm also gonna give it a bite because you know I can't help myself. Mm. Oh my gosh. That's good. Mm. Okay. I'm so excited. So it's nice and tender. It's still holding its body, though. It's still a cube in form, but when you bite into it, it's nice, it's tender, and it's crumbly like I was talking about. So the first thing I want to do is go and drain these potatoes in my colander, and then we'll move on to the rest of the recipe.
All right, so I'm coming back over to the stove, and with me, I have my potatoes in a colander, sitting on top of my pot. I also have a sheet pan, and I like to use the sheet pan to help my potatoes cool. If my potatoes are all sitting up on top of each other in a bowl, some are going to be on the lower parts and still heating and cooking. Others are gonna be on the top. It's just not going to continue to cool evenly. So if you spread them out on a sheet pan and make sure that they're all in one single layer, that will help make sure that they all get nice and cool at the same time.
Okay, I'm just spreading out my potatoes now across the sheet pan. Okay, that looks good. I'm gonna set those off to the side. You know, those are just going to continue to steam, carry over cooking--the process of removing from heat, but allowing the food to continue to cook in the residual heat, is taking place right now, so these potatoes are going to continue to cook a little bit more. But once they stop steaming and kind of cool to room temperature, I'm gonna add them to the fridge. It's super important to continue the recipe with cool potatoes, so we'll set these off to the side.
Meiko: And in our next step will get the dressing prepared for the potatoes. To my bowl, I'm going to add some finally chopped celery. I chopped down two medium stalks. I'm gonna also add some sweet relish. Uh, don't be shy with the sweet relish, especially with that extra juice that kind of floats on the top of the jar. Include that, too. That's gonna add more flavor. (laughs) I'm gonna add two tablespoons of hot sauce. I'm gonna add my seasonings, which is about 1.5 teaspoons of garlic powder, 1.5 teaspoons of onion powder, 1.5 teaspoons of celery seed, 1.5 teaspoons of black pepper. I'm gonna add 1/3 of a cup of yellow mustard. Okay, get that all in there. Now I'm saving this for last because I knew it was gonna be a discussion. 1.5 cups of Miracle Whip.
So, in the battle of the potato salad, which is a real thing (laughs), there is a lot of contention and fire around the type of mayo that you use for your potato salad, depending on the region that you're from, depending on your household preferences. People prefer, like, with a passion, certain dressings. Most commonly, if you're in the South, you're using Duke's. A lot of times on Southern potato recipes, you're gonna add your Duke's mayo and add a little sugar, right? If you're in Louisiana, you're loyal to Blue Plate. As you come up north, more people are more open to using Miracle Whip. And for me, instead of adding mayo and sugar, Miracle Whip really does comprise the perfect blend without having to do both, because everything's already there. So why add an extra step, people? (laughs) I don't get it, but depending on who you talk to you, it's a fight. It's a battle. I am Team Miracle Whip all day long. We can fight about it. Just kidding. (laughs) I don't condone violence.
But what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take my mixing spoon, and I am going to mix all of those ingredients until they are well blended. We don't want to see any orange streaks or yellow streaks. We want everything to be nice and incorporated. This is looking really, really good. And give it a few more stirs. I'm obviously going to give this a little taste. Mm, yo that's so good. You can already taste all those spices coming through and singing. It's got a little kick from the hot sauce. It's got that mustardy bitterness that's gonna hit you. And then it's got the creamy sweetness of the Miracle Whip. This is the perfect dressing for a potato salad at the cookout, at the church supper, at the Sunday dinner. I mean, for every occasion. (laughs) This is the dressing that I like to go with. All right, this is looking good and blended together. Once that is ready to go, what you're going to do is add your diced hard boiled eggs into the dressing.
So there's strategy in picking your eggs. So you know, for me, when I'm making large amounts of potato salad, I always have some, like, not-so-good-looking hard boiled eggs, some really, really pretty ones. I like to save the really, really pretty ones as my beauty eggs. So I set those aside, leave them whole, and I sliced those up and through them on the top of the end. And the ugly ducklings can go right into this potato salad because you can't see them because they're being covered in dressing anyway. So that's how I approach it. (laughs)
Meiko: Alright, that's nice and blended. Alright, so our eggs are mixed in. This looks really good. This dressing is ready to go in the fridge. The other thing that's ready to go in the fridge are the potatoes. They should have cooled down by now. And instead of adding my dressing to my potatoes at this point when they're still somewhat warm, I'm going to wait until both of those elements are chilled and add them together. When you add warm dressing to warm potatoes, you're going to end up with an oily mess. The potatoes are going to melt the mayo base and all you're going to see is eugh, so don't do that. What you want to do is follow this guide and go ahead and chill each ingredient individually. Once they're chilled, you can blend them together and you'll be much happier. I assure you. Just take my word for it. (laughs) So I'm gonna add my potatoes to the fridge, and I'm gonna add my dressing to the fridge. Ok, so while the potatoes and the dressing chills in the fridge, I'm gonna freshen up around here a little bit, and I'll see you guys back here in just an hour.
Meiko: And we're back. This is Play Me A Recipe. It's your girl Meiko from Meiko And The Dish. And today we are making Southern potato salad. When we left off, we just put our potatoes and dressing in the fridge. It's been chilling for an hour. Now we're going to combine them both together. Okay, so this is where the magic happens. It's finally time to mix everything together.
Meiko: So the first thing I like to do is take my large mixing bowl. I'm gonna add to it about a third of my potatoes. And now I'm gonna add about a third of the dressing mix that we made, and I'm gonna get that all mixed together. We want every potato covered. Okay, so we want all of those potatoes to be nice and coated, and then what we're gonna do, which is top secret--this is my sister's trick. She likes to take the back of a wooden spoon or a masher, and she just presses against the potato to mash them like you'd be mashing mashed potatoes. But she's doing that just to the first third of the potatoes, and this is going to really make all of the flavors in that dressing blend well with the potatoes. Because you just don't want potatoes and dressing. You want those flavors that we added--we added, you know, four or five seasons, we added mustard, mayo, celery seed. You want all of that to pop. And so this is going to help get those flavors blended so they are happy and in love. (laughs)
So I'm going to just continue mashing that first third by pressing the back of my spoon with the potatoes in between against the sides of the ball. It's okay to still have chunks. You just want to see that you're achieving some creaminess with it. And that is exactly what I'm seeing. This is looking pretty damn good. Pardon my language. Alright, so once you have the first third mashed, now you can add your second third of potatoes. I'm adding my second third and another third of my dressing. I'm just going to now lightly toss everything together. Just making sure that every potato is completely coated. Oh my gosh. This looks so good. I'm ready to dig in right now. I'm gonna pause for a cause, okay? Just because we're teaching. This is a lesson. But this is looking good already. Okay. And now, add our last third. Adding the potatoes and adding the last of my dressing. And again, you're going to just lightly toss those potatoes in the dressing, folding it, making sure that everything is coated. The last two thirds, you're not mashing. You just want to get it coated. You want there to still be chunkyness and texture from the body of those potato cubes, while still having the creaminess of the first third that we mashed. This looks in-cre-di-ble. It looks incredible. Okay. That looks nice and mixed in. Okay, that looks good.
Next thing, we're gonna grab our beauty egg from the fridge. Okay. You should be nice and chilled. What I like to do is, I like to slice it one time a long ways down the middle. You can actually dice this. You can slice it. You can do whatever you want, but I find that the prettiest way to serve these eggs on top is to do half moons. So I slice it long ways down the middle, turn it on its flat side, and then I just do half moon slices evenly down the egg. That looks good. And just do that to both halves of the egg. Okay, then I'm just going to spruce up my potato salad. Grab my beauty slices. Place that around the top.
Okay, so here's some important next steps. I like to take some celery seed and sprinkle just a little celery seed across the top. This is just a light sprinkling. It's gonna provide a little bit additional texture. Sprinkle on a little chopped green onion and then the piece de resistance--I probably didn't say that right. (laughs) Forgive me. The last and ultimate step is topping it with a hefty sprinkle of paprika. Paprika is when you show people you really love them. Like the heavier your sprinkle, the more you love them, okay? Don't be shy. That's my advice. Okay. And we've got that paprika on the top. It looks incredible. I wish you guys could see this, but if you're making it along with me, you know what I'm talking about. This potato salad looks delicious, and we're going to dig in to make sure that it tastes delicious.
Okay, let me quickly grab a fork so I can dig in and give this a taste. I want the potatoes. I want egg. I want it all. Oh, yeah, this is the perfect spoonful. Mm. Oh my goodness. This reminds me of back home. It's so good. The potatoes, you guys, let's just start there. The potatoes, they have full body. But when you bite into them, your teeth just sink into them. That, to me, is the perfect potato salad, right? That sinkability, (laughs) Is that a measurement? Sinkability of the teeth into the potato. I'm loving that from a textural standpoint. And then you have the contrast of that celery and the relish against the creaminess of the potatoes. I'm also tasting like a tanginess, a bright tanginess from the Miracle Whip and the mustard. And it's just like, layers. I'm telling you, it's just like layers of flavor. I think I did my sister proud. Let me get another bite. (laughs) Sorry. Mmm. I miss home, but this bowl of potato salad brings me right back to cookouts as a kid with my family. Guys, I really can't wait to hear how your recipes turned out. Did you get that fork tender potato like me? Are you using Miracle Whip or do you prefer another mayo on your potato salad? Leave a comment down below and let me know all the tea, ok?
Meiko: I'm so grateful that you guys joined me for Play Me A Recipe. I had such a good time. You can find this recipe for Southern Potato Salad in the show notes and on Food52.com. You can also find me and tons of other recipes at Meikoandthedish.com, and on Instagram at @meikoandthedish. Make sure you guys go check out all 38 amazing recipes and Black food bloggers from the Black History Month Virtual Potluck. Until next time. Peace.