Some genius swaps turn a forgettable cookout extra into a boom-wham-pow side that steals the show! Listen along as Food52's Director of Content, Brinda Ayer, cooks her way through Monifa Dayo's recipe for The Best Potato Salad Ever.
Listen along as Food52's Director of Content, Brinda Ayer, cooks her way through Monifa Dayo's recipe from Black Food which makes some seriously genius swaps to turn a forgettable cookout extra into a boom-wham-pow side that steals the show.
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Kristen Miglore (voiceover): Hi, I'm Kristen Miglore, a lifelong genius hunter. For a decade, I've been unearthing the recipes that have changed the way we cook. Now on The Genius Recipe Tapes, we go behind the scenes with the geniuses themselves. This week, Food52’s Director of Content, Brinda Ayer makes the Best Potato Salad Ever from chef Monifa Dayo in Bryant Terry's most recent cookbook, Black Food. I hope you love it.
Brinda Ayer: Hi, I'm Brinda, the Content Director at Food52, and I am this week's guest host for Genius Recipes I am covering for Kristin while she is away on sabbatical. Today, I'm going to be making a dish that usually I don't like. I'm going to be honest with you, I am not a huge potato salad person, but then I found this recipe and it changed the game for me. The recipe is by Monifa Dayo. It is in a book called Black Food that is curated and edited by Bryant Terry. It's a wonderful collection of recipes from the Black and African diaspora, other than the fact that this recipe convinced a former potato salad hater to love it. I am obsessed with this book because of the sheer diversity of recipes. There are recipes from all corners of the globe. Essentially, there are wonderful stories behind them, the variety of creators and you know, the celebration of creators. I am quartering a bunch of Yukon gold potatoes. They are a super creamy and waxy type of potato, so they'll hold their shape, but also be buttery and delicious, and cut them into big chunks. You don't have to be too precious about it. You want them all about the same size, so they cook evenly.
All right. So now that we are all chopped, I'm going to put them in a pot of water and you'll notice that the water is not boiling yet, nor is the heat even turned on. That's because I want to get all of the potatoes in the pool here and mixed with the salt into the water so that everything is very evenly flavored and evenly cooked. So getting all of the potatoes in here with my handy Five-Two French scraper, which is good for more than baking. I mean, you're supposed to put like a tablespoon and a half or so, but I'm going to salt to my desire, which is a lot of salt cause these potatoes there's a lot of them and you want it to be seasoned well. So stir, you want to use your biggest pot for this so that the potatoes have a lot of room to bubble and do their thing. And then we're going to turn the heat on and bring it up to a boil and let them go. All right. So now I'm going to have a quick pickle, some shallots for the potatoes. And you need a couple of shallots, some salt, and some apple cider vinegar. I'm going to cut the shallots into fairly fine dice. So you don't get big chunks of shallot in the potato salad. And the cool part about this pickling is that you will use both the pickling liquid and the Charlotte's themselves to give some much-needed acidity to the dish.
It also makes it so that the shallots are not super spicy. No dragon breath, so it's a bonus and a super Genius trick. So I'm going to get these in a fine dice. All right. So I'm going to take these chopped shallots, pop them into a bowl, and put some vinegar on top. Apple cider is good because it's a little bit sweet and tart. A healthy amount of salt. Again, you could measure it, but I'm not. And again, like want this very robustly salty, the salt will help draw some of the spices, make them even tastier and more concentrated, stirring it together. And then we're going to set it aside and we'll come back to this in a little bit.
In the meantime, I'm going to check on my potatoes and I'm not super precious about how I check for doneness. I stick to it. And there, and if it comes back without a lot of resistance, then I know that the potatoes are done. It slides in very easily. I think they're ready to go and I can go and drain them. Okay. So I have a pot of water. That's coming up to a boil right here for the poached eggs that we're going to do in. When it comes to a boil, I'm going to season the potatoes and start mixing our salad. So right here have my potatoes. I'm going to start by draining the shallot, pickling liquid all over them, and you'll want to do this early. Save the shallots themselves for a little bit later, but you want to let the potatoes absorb all of the flavor of the vinegar and the shallots and the salt and season from the inside out. And I'm going to take some olive oil and drizzle it on top of it too in the same way that I did the pickling liquid. So again, the potatoes can absorb some of that richness and fruitiness from the olive oil, and these, these guys are pretty well seasoned already, but I think, you know, potatoes can take a lot of salt and you want to make sure they're very, very well seasoned. So I'm going to put some more salt on here and some pepper to taste. And you also don't want them to break apart too much. So be gentle as you're evenly distributing. Now I have two bunches of herbs here. I have a bunch of parsley and a bunch of cilantro and I have them roughly chopped. You want to make sure that it's not too finely chopped when you too finely chop herbs to get slimy we don't want that.
We also have. Lots of bursts of flavor throughout, from the distinct herbs and, and big, big pieces of different sizes. So I'm going to put some parsley in here for spring. Evenly all over then I'm going to do the same with our cilantro. I'm going to start putting all of our dressing ingredients, which we're going to build right here in the bowl. So I'm going to start with some full sentences. Tangy yogurt drizzles it across. We have a full cup here. But I think with, with the salad, so much of it is going to be up to your taste and up to your, you know, preferences. You can use as much or as little. Then I'm going to add some delicious tangy aioli. Come and get that all were in the pockets where the yogurt didn't go. So that was like little bits of different flavors from the dressing throughout. Finally, it's the time for the shallots to shine and I'm going to put, distribute the shallots around. I like the sort of sweetness and at the same time bite that the shallot spring. So I'm probably going to use all of them. But you can use as much or as little as you like. And then, you know, let's go for it. We're going to go full shallot. We're solid ahead. Ben. One of my favorite ingredients because they're so briny and like little bursts of flavor. Some, some capers. So I'm going to again be deliberate about not letting too much of them go into one spot. And then I think what I'm going to do is toss it together. Monifa recommends that you do this with your hands, so that you're a little bit more gentle with it, which I'm down with. But the spoon also works if that's your, that's your thing. So I'm going to get in there and try gently and carefully to toss this with some restaurant. You don't want to mash the potatoes. You don't want anything to be too homogenous. You want like little pockets of flavor everywhere.
All right. So water has come up to a boil. I'm going to poach eight eggs in two batches to let each batch get its own space in the pot and make sure that they are super, even. If not, some people tell you to swirl around the water. I'm going to try this swirling thing. That's helped me in the past and then very carefully cracking the egg and its centripetal force, you know, physics. It helps keep the egg really in good shape. Try the second guy, give it another. Try the third and here.
All right. So we are going to give those a few minutes. When at a simmer, so that the eggs firm up on the outside, but then they're really lovely and jammy on the inside because what we're going to do a spoiler alert, we're going to break them up on top of the potato salad. And the yolks are going to become part of the dressing, making it even more luscious and rich and delicious. So you might have seen hard-boiled eggs and your potato salad of yours, but this is a much tastier spin on it. I think our eggs are looking good and pretty ready. So I'm going to fish them out of the pot. Hey, a slotted spoon. I have a silicone one here because it's extra flexible and then drain them as best as you can, but don't worry too much about it because we're going to plop them on a paper towel-lined or really any towel-lined plate or sheet pan for them to dry a little bit. And then it's really important that you season them now while they're still sort of hot. So they absorb all of the seasonings well. And then there'll be time to put one salad. Great. So our eggs are cool enough to handle. I'm going to dress our salad with them and get some herbs on and then it's time to taste, going to adjust gently, stick these on dot them around the salad, and split them into four. It doesn't have to be super exact, big, identifiable, rustic. Then we'll very gently incorporate them a little bit into the rest of the salad. So they get some of that dressing and tasty and seasonings that we've put in here. Pro tip: Monifa told me that their recipe developer gave me a great tip to almost under mix. don't mix too much because you want everything to be super intact. You want to be able to see all of the elements of the salad. So that's, that's pretty much it going to leave it as it is, and then garnish with a couple of other herbs. So we have as a recap, we have cilantro and parsley in here that we're going to put some dill and tarragon in there for some added freshness and there are slightly more delicate herbs.
So garnishing with them is optional. Again, I feel like this, this recipe is truly choosing your adventure. She instructs us to keep a whole bunch of dill on there, but like if you don't love dill then it's useless. And so I have some tarragon and it's going to be a similar vibe. I'm removing the woody stems, but otherwise, roughly tearing and scattering across, and you can keep a little extra of these herbs. Top off as you're eating, if you are, you know, like me or herb obsessed. So that's looking pretty, pretty good. So we are ready to taste our best potato salad ever. I'm going to spoon some of it onto a plate here and make sure to get all those eggs, lots of little bits of capers, and shallots that are so good. It is. And herbaceous and fresh tasting, but also you have that really rich unctuous quality of the yolks and olive oil and Aeolian yogurt. It's a little bit tangy and has the right amount of salt. And it's so well balanced and tasty. I can safely say I am a potato salad convert, but maybe only for this one, don't tell you.
Kristen (voiceover): Thanks for listening. And thank you so much to Brinda Ayer for making the Best Potato Salad Ever from chef Monifa Dayo. This week's episode was put together by Amy Schuster, Paul Schuler, Harry Sultan, and Emily Hanhan. If you have a favorite time-saving cooking technique, I would love to hear about it at genius@food52.com, or you can tag me at @miglorious on Instagram. And if you like The Genius Recipe Tapes and the Food52 Podcast Network, the very best thing that you can do to support us and to help other people find that is to take a moment to leave us a five-star rating or review. Thanks so much. Talk to you next week.