Not All Potato Salads Wear Mayo!!!

This is olive oil drowned potatoes with lemony onions and herbs. And this is a recipe from More is More, my new cookbook. What's the deal with this recipe? This is a recipe that was inspired by a trip to Portugal when I was sitting seaside and I was having a nice plate of grilled fish and they brought me a side of potatoes and they were completely unadorned. It was just like boiled ass potatoes on a platter and they were swimming in olive oil and then showered in salt and pepper. And it was a moment of realizing that it was like, those were the only things that needed to be on the plate at that very moment. So this is my version of that. It's got a few other tricks up its sleeve, i.e. these quick pickled onions and a boatload of herbs because it wouldn't be a Molly recipe if not. And there's a few things you're gonna take away from this recipe. Number one, potato water needs to be even saltier than pasta water. Number two, we're gonna learn about when less is more and when less is more is actually more. And then number three, we're gonna talk about quick pickling and how it is not inferior to like a standard hot pickle and something that you should have in your back pocket at all times. All right, so let's get into it. Step one, cook the potatoes. The first step to properly cooked potatoes is making sure that you have a pot that's big enough that all of your potatoes can like swim around in there and they're not jammed up on top of one another. This is about what two pounds will look like. To that, I'm going to add three quarts of water. Part of properly seasoning your potatoes is measuring the amount of water that you're adding because if you just go put like a willy nilly amount of water and use my measurement for salt, the ratios will obviously be off. So three quarts of water, cold, over the potatoes and then one cup of salt. It's this whole ass amount of salt, which I know is crazy, but here's the thing. Potatoes are very dense and so it's going to take quite a bit of salt in order for enough of it to actually penetrate through to the inside of the potato, which is what we want in order to season them. That's going on the back burner here and we're going to put it on high heat just to bring it up from cold as quickly as possible. Once it comes up to high heat, I will turn it down. Step two, make the lemony onions. So this is where the whole quick pickling thing is going to come in. What is a quick pickle? It is a pickle that is not heated. So we're going to use some type of acid and some type of seasoning, usually salt and sometimes also sugar. And instead of bringing it up to a boil and heating it and then letting the onions cool and sit in the fridge for a day, which is an amazing way to make a pickle, don't get me wrong, we're just going to macerate them really quickly in lemon juice and salt. And the effect is going to be slightly different. They're going to be a little less crunchy and a little less pickled, but still really vibrant and acidic. And a quick pickle is just a great thing to have in your back pocket when you don't have the time to make a whole batch of pickled onions. And I make them a lot more than I make properly pickled onions because I think they're great. So I'm thinly slicing half of a red onion. I like to pickle red onions because whenever you add acid to a red onion, they turn pink. You could use a white onion, you could use a shallot, you could use a yellow onion, but the red onions are pretty cute. And then the acid that I'm going to use here is lemon juice. So you could use vinegar, you could use white wine vinegar, you could use distilled vinegar, or really any kind of acid here to just sort of mellow out the bite of the onion. And so we're just squeezing lemon juice over them. And then we're going to season them with salt and use our hands to kind of like macerate them and squeeze them a bit to encourage the salt to be absorbed into the surface of the onions. And then we're going to set these aside. And every couple of minutes, as we're doing other things in the recipe, we're just going to give them a toss. Part of the joy of a quick pickle is there's not really a recipe. So it's not a measured amount the way a proper pickle brine is. And so you can kind of zhuzh your way to a pickle, which is what I like about it. It's more like cooking, less like baking. The potatoes came to a boil and then got reduced to a simmer and they simmered for like 10 minutes. The cook time is going to vary greatly depending on what size your potatoes are. Mine are like yay big. They took about 10 minutes of simmering. If yours are yay small, they'll take like four to five minutes of simmering. And the only way to know really is to pierce into them, poke them, and see if you encounter any resistance with your knife. So I'm using a sharp knife and I'm just going to slide in to this middle potato here. And we're going to see how it feels. Pretty good, no resistance. I think they need one more minute. Like it slid in and then I started to feel like a little, little something stick. You don't ever want to have to force your knife through. I'm going to give it 60 more seconds and then we're going to drain. I've pierced through with no resistance. It is, my bicep hurts. So as you can see, we're dumping obviously all of that water out. And just think about how much of the salt is getting dumped out along with that water. If you think of it that way, it's really not that much salt. All right, so the next thing we want to do is smash the potatoes. If you let them cool until they're cool enough to handle, you can kind of like break them apart with your hands and that's totally fine. If you don't have the patience, like me right now, I'm just going to use something else to smash them so I don't do it. This is a one cup measuring cup. And so I'm just like pressing down on them and you see they're splitting really easily. That's an indication that they're cooked really nicely. So we're just breaking them apart. The reason we're doing that is that we want to expose the innards because pretty soon here, we're going to drench them in olive oil and we want it all to really soak the olive oil up. If we were to leave them in their whole state, the skins would prevent the oil from soaking into them. That's also why we don't cut them because then we have these really clean cuts and it doesn't expose a lot of surface area for all of the seasoning, the oil, the lemony onions, the lemon juice and everything to soak in. I'm going to taste this little bit of the inside here to determine whether they got enough seasoning with that one cup of salt. Please hold. They are seasoned. And guess what? They are not salty. They are not even close to salty. In fact, I probably could have put an extra quarter cup of salt in there if I wanted to. That's how much salt you need. Here, I'm going to start adding them to a serving bowl. And then here comes the drenching or the drowning. Are they called drenched or drowned? The drowning. Here comes the drowning. Here's where we're going to just absolutely drown them in olive oil. And it is really important, like crucial in this recipe that you use an olive oil that you love the taste of. You should always look for extra virgin olive oil and especially when you're finishing dishes. So we're not cooking anything here. We are going to add a preposterous amount of olive oil to these potatoes here. And so look at that. It better be something you love the taste of. I love the taste of California olive ranch, so that's what I'm choosing to use. And if you're in the grocery store and you're like, I don't know what the heck olive oil to get, this is a great place to start. So I'm doing this in a couple of layers just because I want to make sure that olive oil touches all of the parts of the potatoes. So like I put some down, now I'm drizzling. The recipe will call for a measured amount of olive oil just to give you a sense of how much you're going to need. And then it will tell you, keep drizzling until you feel like they're swimming. Drown, drizzle, don't hold back. This is the less is more, more is more moment. We are using here one, two, three, four ingredients on these potatoes, but we're using a lot of them. I am now going to scatter over the lemony onions. That's a lot of lemony onions. I'm going to squeeze a lot of lemon juice all over this. And then I'm just going to pick a lot of herbs. You're just going to absolutely shower them. I'm also going to keep seasoning as I go because now that we've added a lot of fat and oil to the potatoes, they're going to need a little bit more salt. So you may need to re-season. And then lots of freshly ground black pepper. The thing that's more about this recipe is that we're using a lot more than you might normally be comfortable with of a lot fewer ingredients. It's like an alt potato salad of sorts. So I really like to eat this warm, but I've also had it cold because if you have leftovers, you're going to throw them in the fridge. So it can kind of flex as like a side dish or a potato salad that's eaten either warm or cold. And instead of making a mayonnaise dressing, you're making a lemon and olive oil dressing. And you're basically just drowning them in that. So let's review. We learned that it takes a boatload of salt to properly season potatoes. We learned that sometimes being more means using more of each ingredient, but not using lots of different ingredients. And then we learned that a quick pickle is a great thing to have in your back pocket. It requires no recipe. It takes no time, no cooking. And it's something that you can add to any and all dishes, not just potato salad. Okay, I want to get down to the bottom here because these are the guys who have been like really luxuriating in olive oil. It's all about the olive oil. I think those are really yummy. Yeah, really, really yummy? They're really, really yummy.