Potato Salad: Spicy Southwest And Italian

Last month's experiments with putting new twists on old favorites included several different types of potato salad to go with all our mouth-watering barbecue fare.  We already went into detail on our standard vegetable potato salad as well as an out-of-this-world chicken bacon ranch variety, but the experimentation didn't stop there. Today we'll look at two more versions of this summer favorite: Italian and spicy southwest.


Megan and I keep a white board in our kitchen so we can write down ideas for interesting new meals whenever inspiration strikes, and while washing dishes one day after lunch we came up with a fantastic idea: what if we combined the best of both Italian pasta salad and potato salad into one delicious side?


Our Italian potato salad starts off with standard baking potatoes cut into wedges and boiled until tender. You could substitute any kind of potato you want here though, if another variety strikes your fancy.

When I think of pasta salad my mind usually brings up two ingredients first: Italian dressing and mozzarella. To make our combination of two different dishes really stand out, we went to the olive bar at our local grocery store and picked up fresh mozzarella balls marinated in seasoned olive oil.  "Buffalo" style mozzarella or any of the fresh varieties packed in small containers at the specialty cheese section of the grocery store are equally good options. Here I'm cutting them into halves to be tossed with the potatoes.

For color and to keep the Italian theme going, we also quartered grape tomatoes, which were the perfect size and texture for this collision of flavors.

Pasta salad frequently has a meat element, such as pepperoni. We found a bag of turkey pepperoni already in small coin shapes on clearance at Smith's to use, but any similar ingredient would work great.

Now we're mixing it all together, along with mayo and some Italian dressing to further combine the ideas of potato and pasta salad. Even with the tomato it all turned out a bland color though, which just wouldn't do...

So we upped the ante with diced orange bell peppers and plenty of green onion slices, adding both color and  more of a fun pasta theme.

This is our finished Italian potato salad, combining ideas from two different cultures into one perfect offering. The fresh mozza and grape tomatoes really make this dish an explosion of flavor, and the end result is good enough to dig into with a spoon instead of using as a side!

As our regular readers have probably figured out, we love using peppers (have you used our pepper comparison guide to try out your own pepper-based kitchen adventures yet?) and I like adding hot sauce to just about anything. Since our basic potato salad already features a load of veggies, why not tweak the recipe to go in a spicy Southwest direction? For our Southwest potato salad, we're starting with onion, red bell pepper, anaheim, and poblano. If you want it spicier, you could also add in serrano or jalapenos.

Each pepper or vegetable is diced up into small pieces, just large enough to provide a firm texture to every bite of soft boiled potato.

Everything gets tossed together as before in preparation for adding the final mayo concoction.

For this version of potato salad, we mixed together mayo with a white wine mustard and two types of hot sauce. The end result was the right balance of savory heat, but if you like it hot, hot, hot, ditch the Grey Poupon and go with spicy brown or a hot specialty mustard and put in as much sauce as you can handle.

After lightly beating it all together with a spoon a few times we had Southwest potato salad perfection to accompany delicious barbecued pork and chicken!

Thanks for checking in, and hope to see you again soon as we continue to try new things on our culinary travels. We'll be bringing you plenty of barbecued dinners, diner-style breakfasts, and much more throughout the rest of the summer.