Potato Salad With 7-Minute Eggs And Mustard Vinaigrette

For many years, my grandma's potato salad was always the best. "Weekend Potato Salad" that lasted 1 day when we'd all go to my grandparents' cottage near French Creek. But then my stomach started rebelling against mayonnaise dressed salads and against raw onions. So I quit eating potato salad.

When SP and I started cooking together, we started making potato salads with vinegar dressing because he dislikes mayo and I dislike it as a salad dressing. Turns out, I like vinegar dressed potato salad better (sorry grandma!). It's tastier than mayo dressed potato salad (to us) and I don't end up with an upset stomach (no mayo & we use very little onion). But sometimes you need a little twist on a tried & true beloved dish, something to spice things up a bit. A few summer magazine issues had recipes for potato salad with mustard/mustard seeds, and that got my attention. So we decided to try one: Potato Salad With 7-Minute Eggs And Mustard Vinaigrette.

One twist: toasted mustard seeds:

Ours didn't pop too much so we didn't have mustard seeds flying around the kitchen.

The other 2 "twists" were the addition of dill pickle and 7 minute boiled eggs (soft yolks).

A few notes:

• We used red potatoes & boiled, not steamed, them.
• We kept the pickle separate since we were eating this over several days.
• We cooked our eggs until they were hard boiled since I was worried about any soft/runny yolk and eating this over several days. We also finely chopped them.

I would like to try this with the soft set yolks because I can see how the creamy yolk would add a lot of silkiness to the salad. Even with the "more cooked" egg, the salad seemed silky. Next time I might try to scale this back to 2 servings so we can use the runnier eggs. I really liked the flavors from the mustard seeds and the tangy mustard-honey-olive oil-vinegar dressing plus the crunchy sip from the pickles. You need a bit of crunch in potato salad.

We'd definitely make this again. It's nice to have a slightly different potato salad recipe to change it up since the same one can get kind of boring.

Recipe from Bon Appetit June 2015. Find it here.