- The salad is underseasoned. Foods that are served cold
need to be seasoned more aggressively than foods that are
served hot—our taste buds are less receptive at colder
temperatures. Combine this with the heaviness of potatoes,
and it makes sense that a potato salad needs to have more
vinegar, sugar, spice, and salt than most other dishes. But
balance is key. All the elements need to come together,
instead of competing.
Hot and Cold
The first step is getting the texture just right. Potatoes are
made up of a series of cells that contain starch granules.
These cells are glued together with pectin. As the potatoes
cook, the pectin slowly breaks down and the starch granules
start absorbing water. When you overcook them, the first
thing that happens is the pectin breaks down too much. The
potato cells start falling away, and the whole thing turns
mushy. Welcome to cold-mashed-potato city, population:
you. Overcook them even more, and the starch granules will
swell so much that they’ll begin to burst, turning a mildly
offensive bowl of cold mashed potato salad into an outright
disrespectful bowl of gluey, inedible goo. Undercook
potatoes, on the other hand, and they remain crunchy, and
crunchy potatoes are grounds for immediate ejection from
the backyard.
It gets even more complex: since potatoes heat up from
the exterior toward the center, it’s possible to have a potato
that’s simultaneously overcooked and undercooked. The
best way to accomplish this feat of culinary indecency is to
drop your cut potatoes into a pot of already-boiling water.