Sour Cream Is The Secret Ingredient For Lighter, Tangier Potato Salad
Potato salad makes for one great side dish, as well as the perfect contribution to a potluck or summer barbeque. While it's undeniably delicious, it can be a bit heavy since mayonnaise is often used as the base of the dressing. Luckily, there's a way to lighten up the dish: Swap out the mayo for sour cream.
Sour cream will not only make the potato salad lighter, but it will also bring in a unique, fresh taste to the familiar dish thanks to its tanginess. But, if what you love most about a mayo-based potato salad is its creaminess, there's no need to worry -- sour cream is still plenty creamy, so you won't notice any difference on that front. It's quite similar in consistency to Greek yogurt, which is another common substitute for mayo and is sometimes combined with mayo in certain recipes. For any recipe, whether it calls for mayo or mayo combined with Greek yogurt, you can swap out the amount of mayo for the same amount of sour cream.
Read more: 23 Types Of Potatoes And When To Use Them
Potato Salad Recipes To Try Out The Sour Cream Swap
If you like the idea of swapping mayo for sour cream to make a bright and tangy dressing for a potato salad, you're in luck — the swap works for just about any recipe out there. For example, a classic Southern potato salad recipe, filled with chopped hard-boiled eggs, celery, and relish, is meant to have a bit of tanginess already, thanks to the inclusion of yellow mustard, so the sour cream will fit right in if you use it in place of mayo.
There are also vinaigrette-based dressings for potato salad like in Tasting Table's recipe for French potato salad. For these types of recipes, which don't call for mayonnaise, you can still include a few tablespoons of sour cream to make the dressing if you prefer it thicker and richer than a vinaigrette — this way, you still get all of the flavors of the vinaigrette but with a hint of tangy creaminess.
Just like with a normal potato salad, you can still include plenty of added ingredients to make your sour cream-based potato salad even more indulgent. One route you can take is to make it a cheesy potato salad -- after all, there's a reason that sour cream is often served alongside quesadillas: The tanginess pairs beautifully with the savory, gooey cheese. You could also go for a play on sour cream and onion, either by adding diced onions or, for a more decadent variation, caramelized onions.
Read the original article on Tasting Table.
