Instagram Post 11/3/2017

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More of my home cooking from Japan 🇯🇵 by way of Brooklyn 🇺🇸!

Here’s my rendition of Japanese potato salad. (Yes, it’s a thing.) Its name, ポテトサラダ, is pronounced approximately “potato salada”; needless to say, there’s a word for potato in Japanese, じゃがいも, “jagaimo”, but since the dish is rather American, the English name is used more commonly. The texture is key to this dish: the potatoes are partially mashed but there are still abundant chunks. It works because the mashed potatoes meld with and become an integral part of the dressing; the chunks remain to provide occasional bites of straight ahead potato.

My ingredient list cleaves pretty closely to the canonical Japanese version: potato 🥔, carrot 🥕, cucumber 🥒, hardboiled egg 🥚, sweet onion, ham; and the dressing is fairly authentic: mayo (only Kewpie of course!), rice wine vinegar, and neri wakarashi (Japanese mustard paste) but I’ve added a little sweet miso paste as well as a few shakes of ichimi togarashi (dried Japanese red pepper) and sansho (dried Japanese green pepper peel) to kick it up a little, and a sprinkling of shichimi (a seasoning mix of Japanese red pepper, sesame seed, orange peel, yuzu, etc.) and black sesame seeds on top. Simple, but most satisfying.

Of course, the ingredients’ proportions are what distinguish one recipe from another, so I haven’t really revealed any secrets here!

Those are Thai spicy pickled mangoes on the side for flavor and color contrast.