The Secret To Great Potato Salad Is Something Most People Throw Out After Breakfast

You can serve potato salad cold as a side dish at your cookout, or you can serve it hot like the Germans do with their unique spin on the salad. You can enrich potato salad with more flavor by adding French onion dip mix, or use the classic seafood seasoning, Old Bay, for an amazing spin. To give an earthy twist, you can even swap the spuds with sweet potatoes. No matter what you do with it, potato salad is probably going to be delicious. But if you want to really take it to the next level, you can make use of something you might have otherwise tipped out into the trash after making breakfast. That's right — the secret ingredient for your new favorite potato salad recipe is bacon drippings.

As we all know, salt makes just about everything taste better — not necessarily saltier (although that's often the case as well), but also stronger and more like itself. It's true of chocolate, it's true of oatmeal, and it's certainly true of potato salad, as well. So when you incorporate something like bacon drippings, which come from salted meat, into your potato salad dressing, something wonderful happens. Everything gets its flavor boosted, and it's all rounded out with a tasteful smack of bacon flavor, too. And who could say no to that? (Well, aside from those who don't eat bacon).

If you think simply stirring some bacon grease straight into your potato salad is a bit gauche, there are other ways you can use the stuff to make your contribution to the cookout that much better. After all, you need to cook the potatoes before adding them to your salad, don't you? So why not go through a little extra trouble and sauté them in bacon drippings? Not only is it a delicious way to make use of those ingredients, it's a little bit neater, too — and you'll be taking those compliments you get with you for the rest of your life.

And you're not just going to fry up some bacon for its drippings without using the bacon itself, right? That's why it's such a great idea to chop up that bacon into little pieces and toss them into your potato salad as well, adding a ton of flavor and some extra crunch. If you'd rather not fry anything yourself, you can always buy those little Bacon Bits jars (which aren't actually bacon, for the vegetarians among us) and shake some into your dish, but I'd say that's not quite as much fun.