Potato Salad {Texas BBQ Style}. This creamy potato salad is perfect for all your Summer BBQs. Made with tender potatoes, hardboiled eggs, dill pickle relish, in a tangy mayonnaise, mustard based dressing.
Want a truly Southern Potato Salad? The type served at the BBQ joints? The potato salad that you crave alongside those ribs and slices of brisket, or on the side of a juicy burger? Then this is the recipe for you! This mayonnaise based, mustard potato salad, is beyond easy to make. Only a handful of ingredients are needed.
How to make a Texas Style Potato Salad:
- Boil potatoes: Peel and chop potatoes to 1/2 inch cubes. Add the potatoes to a large pot and cover the potatoes with water, bring this to a boil and let the potatoes cook to soften.
- Add potatoes and diced hardboiled eggs together.
- Make Dressing. This mayonnaise based dressing is made by combining mayonnaise with mustard, dill pickle relish and salt and pepper. Simple and easy.
- Mix dressing into potatoes and egg.
- Chill. Let the salad chill in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours before serving so the dish is nice and cold.
What is the best kind of potato to use?
It depends on the texture that you want for your potato salad.
- Waxy potatoes (gold potatoes):will hold their shape after boiling and mixing.
- Starchy potatoes (russet potatoes): will soften and become slightly mashed after mixing with the dressing, and they absorb the flavor of the dressing better.
It’s up to you which type of potato to use in your potato salad. I typically use russet potatoes for this recipe and that is the potato that is photographed. You can see that it’s not defined chopped potatoes in the finished dish.
Pro Tips:
- Add the dressing while the potatoes are warm, this helps them to absorb the flavor better. Since this is a mayonnaise based dressing, don’t dress as soon as they finish cooking and are hot, let them sit and cool for 15-20 minutes first.
- Salt the potatoes while cooking once the water starts boiling. This helps add more flavor.
- This dish always tastes better the second day! So plan ahead and make this recipe the day before.
More BBQ Side Dishes:
Potato Salad {Texas BBQ Style}
Ingredients
- 3 lbs potatoes, russet or gold
- 3 large eggs, hardboiled
- 1 cup mayonnaise
- ¼ cup yellow mustard
- ⅓ cup dill pickle relish
- ½ tsp salt
- ¼ tsp pepper
Equipment
Instructions
- Peel and chop the potatoes to 1/2 inch size cubes. Add the potatoes to a large pot. Cover with water and heat over medium heat to a boil. Sprinkle in about 1 tsp of salt.
- Cook the potatoes until they are fork tender, approximately 15-20 minutes.
- Drain the potatoes and rinse under cold water. Add potatoes back into the empty pot and place back on stovetop. The warm pot helps dry off the potatoes.
- In a small bowl combine the ingredients for the dressing: mayonnaise, mustard, relish, salt and pepper.
- After potatoes have cooled about 20 minutes, add them to a large bowl. Dice the hardboiled egg and add to the bowl with the potatoes.
- Spoon the dressing over the potatoes, and gently stir to mix and coat the potatoes in the dressing.
- Cover and chill for at least 2 hours before serving.
Notes
- Can be made ahead of time and stored overnight before serving.
- Store in sealed container in refrigerator for up to 5 days.
Good recipe, tastes very much of home (we’re currently living away from Texas, but eager to get back once we can). I made a few changes to the cooking process:
When I cooked the potatoes, I added about a tablespoon of vinegar for each quart of boil water. The pectin that binds the potato starch molecules together breaks down more slowly in acidic environments, so adding vinegar to the cook water makes the “window of perfection” stay open for longer (i.e., it makes it harder to overcook them).
As soon as I’d transferred the rinsed potatoes back to the pot, I sprinkled them with a couple of tablespoons of dill pickle juice. As they cool, they’ll shrink a very small amount, and the cooked starch on their surface will harden; both of these will keep flavors from penetrating quite as much. Adding a bit of pickle juice when they’re still quite hot gave them a bit more brightness, which balanced out the richness of the mayo and eggs.
Delicious! Next time I might use a bit more mustard (maybe make the mayo/mustard ratio 2:1 instead of 4:1, or maybe use a combination of yellow mustard and dijon mustard, or both)? Might also add some chopped red onion or celery or minced serrano or smoked paprika… One of the great things about this recipe is that it’s yummy on its own, but straightforward enough that it can serve as a wonderful canvas for experimentation.
Thank you so much for your comment Greg! I love the information about adding the vinegar to the boiling water. I’m so glad that the recipe gave you something to work with and brought back some tastes of home! Hope you get back to Texas soon. Texas misses you too!