Cheryl Marie Cordeiro

A homemade potato salad with fresh, crisp green apples that goes splendid with barbecued chicken.
J E Nilsson and C M Cordeiro-Nilsson © 2011

A while back I asked a friend, Torbjörn Eliasson, about his thoughts on a potato salad that would go nicely with a barbecued Chicken, and after a quick raid in the grocery store, he came up with more or less this suggestion. He refuses though to take credit for this recipe since I am not using “the right yogurt”, which neither of us remember the name of anyway, but it is a thick, French made yoghurt with a stiff consistency, which is important for the salad’s ability to stay firm.

Presented in this post is a pretty close version of this day’s original potato salad anyway.

Choose the juiciest and most wholesome barbecued chicken you can find, straight from the store, and you’ll have a gorgeous lunch.

Only cold ingredients go into this salad, even the boiled potatoes.

Ingredients for 4-6 persons

Base:
5 or more cold boiled potatoes of a firm cooking type (Asterix)
1 peeled green apple, all cut to dices
2 chopped up shallots or/and maybe half a red onion, in small dices

Sauce:
300 ml crème fraîche
300 ml thick yoghurt
(If this becomes too thick or fatty depending on brands, add up to 300 ml of whipped cream to taste)

Flavour
1-2 tbs capers
Some spring onion strands to taste
The seeds from 1 pomegranate, stir in some or add all on top of the finished salad together with the spring onion
Add salt and black pepper, and taste! This is very important since your local ingredients can be so different from what we used.

For the potatoes use firm potatoes, already boiled or boil a new set and set them aside to cool before mixing. Carefully fold the ingredients together, and the salad is done! The pomegranate seeds comes the very last since they will color the whole thing pink otherwise, or you can skip them entirely if you want.

Capers – in French, câpres – are the ripe flower buds of the Capparis spinosa pickled in vinegar.

The pomegranate is seedy but looks fantastic when out of the pod and gives a certain bite to the salad.

If you want the potato salad to go with beef instead of chicken, you could consider leaving out both the apple and the pomegranate.

Add a generous twist of black pepper and salt to taste. 1 tsp of each will be good for a start. The apple and the sour cream you are using will decide if you need to add some extra sugar. Then, in my view, there is nothing that sugar can do that honey doesn’t do better.

Enjoy!