“Austrian” potato salad: German style potato salad without the pork or the faff!
I love potato salads of all kinds but my favorite is the German style. When I was a kid my grandma Leubstorf used to make a painstakingly assembled potato salad where she seasoned each individual potato slice by hand. SOOOO good! Soooo laborious! Also time consuming since you had to wait till the potatoes cooled enough to handle. The big thing I learned from her is that proper German potato salad is sliced. You don’t want cubes or chunks, you want slices.
The other thing about German potato salad is that it is often cooked with pork fat and has added bacon in the final salad. While this is a savory delight, cooking with rendered pork fat is not everyone’s thing.
This recipe is adapted from Milk Street magazine. I have changed a few things to make it easier, more streamlined and with fewer exotic ingredients.
The magic here is all in the prep and cooking technique. Slice the potatoes and cook them in minimal water. Make sure you dress the potatoes as quickly as possible because they will absorb everything better when they are hot. Let it cool on the counter till it is warm or room temperature, and if you must refrigerate, leave it out to come to room temperature before serving. (American potato salads with mayonnaise always need to be eaten immediately or served very cold, but this salad has no mayo, and a lot of vinegar and I think it would take a really long time to be unsafe...)
Ingredients
2 pounds of Yukon Gold potatoes
2 cups chicken or veggie stock
½ cup chopped pickles
½ medium onion chopped
Two stalks celery, chopped
1 teaspoon caraway seeds
One tablespoon mustard
¼ cup oil (can be olive or any salad oil)
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1 tablespoon juice from pickle jar
Handful of fresh dill
Salt and pepper
Peel and slice the potatoes into ⅓ inch thick pieces. Put potatoes in large sauce pan, cover with chicken stock. You may need to add a cup of water to cover potatoes depending on your pan. Salt water (1 teaspoon of salt). Bring to a boil and cook for 9 minutes. Reserve ½ cup of cooking liquid before draining the potatoes.
Drain the potatoes, put them in a large bowl and toss them with 1 tablespoon of the red wine vinegar and the pickle juice, the celery and the pickle pieces.
In the same saucepan that you cooked the potatoes add the reserved cooking liquid, the onions and the caraway seeds. Bring that to a boil and cook for one minute. Turn off heat and add remaining vinegar, oil, mustard, salt and pepper and whisk with a fork or a whisk until combined. Pour this dressing over the potatoes and stir till thoroughly combined. Chop dill finely and garnish the salad with it before serving. Some of the potatoes should mash up a bit, but there will be plenty of whole chunks. Let the salad sit for at least 15-60 minutes before serving.
Option: Use cornichons and cornichon juice instead of pickles. They are tiny very sour pickles. If you are doing that, you may want to add a teaspoon of honey or sugar to the dressing to balance the flavors.
So a few weeks back I posted this burrito recipe and you guys seemed to like it. So I’m going to post a recipe once a week. I really should have a photo of this week’s recipe because the way it looks when it’s cooking is one of the best things about it. Seriously I used to have this recipe as my phone lock screen. But all photos of campfire cooking are lost to me now. (Ahhhh technology).
Enough chatter. Here’s the recipe
Campfire hot pot
Serves Four
It’s camping season and this is my favorite thing to cook over an open fire. You can also cook this on a gas range, hot plate or Colman stove. A heavy cast iron dutch oven is needed for this recipe so a light, back-packing stove probably won’t fit the bill.
This recipe was developed to try to recreate the magic of those little packets of vegetables and meat that we used to call “hobos” back in a less enlightened day. Hobos were made by burying the packets under hot coals. While the cooking method is romantic and fun, it takes FOREVER to get a fire to make enough coals to manage this and you will likely end up with ash in your food; half of the packets under cooked and the other half over cooked. And then there’s the whole thing about not cooking in aluminum. This recipe embraces the romance of cooking on an open fire, without all the time and frustration of those little packets. Instead you should end up with a nicely smokey, toothsome, carmelized stew in just under an hour.
Ingredients
2-3 brats or a 1 large ring smoked polish sausage. Any sausage will work, including meat substitute. (If using meat sub, or lean sausage like bison or chicken add 2 tablespoons of oil to the pot), chopped into 1 inch pieces.
1 medium onion, chopped
6 cloves of garlic, halved
3 medium carrots, cut into 1.5 inch pieces
6 medium potatoes (red or yukon gold hold their shape best in the stew), cut into 1.5 inch pieces.
Dried pepper flakes to taste
Salt
Pepper
10 ounces of beer--or one standard American bottle/can minus a few swigs for the cook.
You will need a good sturdy grate to hold your dutch oven. The nice thing about this is that you don’t need to wait ages for the fire to burn down to coal. You can put the grate right over flames and you’ll be fine.
Combine all the ingredients in the dutch oven, except for the beer. Place pot on the hottest part of the fire with the lid off. Cook for about fifteen minutes, stirring every minute or two with a long handled spoon (or stick for extra wilderness points). When the meat is browned, the onion is translucent and the veggies have carmelized a bit, add in the beer, cover and cook for a half and hour on a less hot part of the fire. Can open and stir occasionally (every 10 minutes or so). Serve on tin plates with cold beer.
New weekly recipe is up! Sweet Potato Fries & Cheese Omelette #WeeklyRecipe #Blogger #NewBlogger @FemaleBloggerRT
This is a really simply but filling lunch. When you have a busy day planned out, it is important that you have a substantial meal that will give you energy to keep going without leaving you feeling sluggish!
Sweet Potato Fries and a Cheese Omelette is my solution when I don’t have much time to prepare a meal.
An added bonus is that when the fries are cooking, you have some time before you have…
New Weekly Recipe up now! Banana Oat Cookies #NewBlogger #WeeklyRecipe
New blogger fail number one! Sigh! I’ve come to realise that I love to experiment when it comes to cooking and baking, pulling ingredients out and adding them in as I go along. Fantastic, especially when you get tasty cookies to enjoy at the end of it. Useless however, if you are intending to write a blog post and more specifically, a recipe post!
(ah, yi-di here. i'm still not sure how to format these posts, so bear with me while i work it out. no photos either, because the lighting was terrible at home, but in the future, i'll amend this post with drawings or handwritten titles or something.)
today was a market day! the way things are in melbourne, most raw meat is cheaper at the farmer's market, but chicken tends to be cheaper at the supermarket. for the longest time i hadn't been able to go to the market because of work and my inability to leave the house before 2 pm, so i've neglected my market goods for a while. but i have a bit more time on my hands now, and finally got a very satisfying market shop done.
this is the sort of weeknight menu that followed. recipes under the cut.
roast chicken with tabouleh and coleslaw
pan-fried blue grenadier fillets with spicy pesto
pork and fennel pasta
roast chicken with tabouleh and coleslaw from the deli
the whole chicken i got from the supermarket the day before. i always buy free-range chicken to roast because it just tastes SO. MUCH. BETTER. normal chickens in australia have an 0dd, insipid, watery taste that i despise, but free-range chickens have a much more naturally meatier, proper taste. (the bird is also probably a lot happier, so yay!) to me, the difference in taste and kindness is well-worth the few extra dollars. this one cost me about $12 for a 2 kg bird.
we've mastered our own way of roasting chickens at home which gives us crispy skin, but moist and tender meat (even the breast!!). this is how we do it, using our dinky oven (so please adjust for your own equipment) and with a stuffed bird.
1. get your chicken out of its packaging, wipe it down with a paper towel. sprinkle liberally with salt, let stand at room temperature for 30 minutes to an hour or however long it takes to preheat your oven to 180°C, fan-forced.
2. wipe off any moisture from the skin that the salt has drawn out. dry skin is crucial to crispy skin! re-season skin with salt, pepper, anything you like.
3. get two pats of butter (if you feel fancy, get some herbs or lemon rind and mash it into the butter), then slip the butter pats under the skin of each breast. totally not crucial if you don't want the extra work or calories, the meat'll just be a bit drier. i skipped this step once, and the breast meat wasn't as juicy and tender as usual.
4.place your chicken BREAST-SIDE DOWN in the roasting pan and roast for 30 mins at 180°C.
5. rotate the pan, lower the heat to 160°C and roast for 45 mins.
6. flip your chicken now so it is BREAST-SIDE UP, baste with the juices that probably have seeped out of it, increase heat to 180°C and roast for 30 mins.
7. rotate the pan, roast at 160°C for 30 mins. keep an eye at this point if it browns too fast.
8. when it's done, let it rest for ~10 mins while you set the table, etc, then carve it up and serve! i save the bones and carcass for chicken soup; the feeling using the entire animal is one of the most satisfying pleasures in the world.
i don't know why this strange timing system works, only that IT DOES. done this way, the meat is so tender and falling off the bone, it's like a slow-cooked chicken. basting the chicken with juices between each time point also helps the skin brown deliciously. i served this with coleslaw and tabouleh from the supermarket deli ($5 each, a great and easy way to bulk up a meal) and the dishes below, and it was amazing.
pork and fennel pasta
pork and fennel is one of my FAVOURITE flavour combinations. instead of using minced pork, i buy fresh sausages from the market ($3 for 5; the freshness is crucial because supermarket snags tend to taste very artificial and strange to me) and remove them from their casings and roll them up into meatballs. but whatever you like, and whatever works for your lifestyle! my main goal with this pasta sauce is to keep it refreshing and zingy despite pork being a heavy meat. the fennel and chilli flakes really brighten it up, and the mashed whole tomatoes add a delicious acidity.
dice your garlic and an onion. get them nice and aromatic in some olive oil over medium heat. turn up the heat, chuck in the meatballs and let them brown. sprinkle in a teaspoon or so of fennel seeds; extra points if you get them all stuck into the meatballs! when the meatballs have browned, deglaze the pan with white wine (i had none on hand, so i used sake.). tip in a can of tinned tomatoes (i like whole tomatoes rather than diced), a bit of water, chilli flakes, salt, pepper, some sugar. bring to a boil and simmer for at least 30 mins. at the end, the sauce should have reduced a fair bit. taste and season to your liking. balance salt, sweet, spicy, and sour as you like. i love adding a dash of vinegar right at the end to tie everything all up. tip in your cooked pasta (i like large spirals to catch the sauce), parmesan, chopped parsley and devour.
panfried blue grenadier fillets with spicy capsicum pesto
on my way out of the market i remembered fish - we rarely eat fish at home because the fish available at the supermarket is disgusting and never fresh, and we hardly get to go to the market. i don’t usually shop with a dish in mind; i usually buy what is on special and get inspired from there.
it so happened that blue grenadier was on special for $7 a kilo, and it’s usually double or more that. so i picked up a fillet for $5. i panfried it in a bit of butter and served it with some of the spicy capsicum pesto i bought at the market. again, dry out the skin with salt, wipe, re-season. cook skin side down. one of my kitchen rules is that “from scratch” is really not as important as some people hype it up to be. we live in the real world, with real jobs. it may be a bit more expensive, but i’m not going to make my own pesto when the deli at the market makes such a delicious one. it was a little pricey at $6 a tub, but you only need so little and it's so fantastically versatile.
i was very happy with the shop; i got a lot of fresh produce for incredibly decent prices, and i managed to put a substantial and incredibly complimentary menu on the table. shopping like this keeps me grounded and happy, and i love thinking of ways to use my thriftily-bought ingredients. my food is very meat-heavy, yes :D some families might find it enough to just have one main meat, but we need our protein.
in the end, there was a little too much fish to eat in one sitting, so i saved some uncooked fillets and marinated them in a miso-marinade, which i’ll bake tomorrow! please look forward to that menu :) it will look something like this:
pork belly and daikon nimono with potatoes, shiitake mushrooms and brocollini
miso-marinated blue grenadier
beef steak with onion sauce
baked chicken wings
genmaicha-cooked japanese rice (using sj's recipe!)
