The Simple Way To Fix Vinegary Store-Bought Potato Salad

It depends on the brand and store, but sometimes (at least, in my experience) grocery store salads tend to come packed inside lots of preservatives like vinegar. Now, vinegar is an important ingredient in a good potato salad; it helps the spuds keep their shape and it's a simple trick for fixing dry potato salad. Even Ina Garten uses it for her extra creamy potato salad. The problem is that vinegar has an exceptionally strong, acidic taste in a dish with lots of otherwise neutral ingredients like potatoes, eggs, and celery. If you take a bite of a potato salad you just bought and your tongue immediately lights up with that vinegar taste, how can you dial it back? We asked Chuck Hayworth, a private chef, medical meals specialist, and the owner of Real Medical Meals.

According to Hayworth, your goal is to undercut the taste of vinegar with other flavors. His immediate suggestion was to try adding Greek yogurt and honey because "sweet and creamy balances out the sourness of vinegar." Unflavored Greek yogurt is sometimes used as a substitute for cream in potato salad. In a pre-made salad, it becomes a thick, tangy method for covering up that strong vinegar flavor, so make sure you're prepared for the texture change Greek yogurt brings. Honey is more straightforward and can be easily drizzled or mixed into the salad with little effort on your part.

If you've got time, there are other ways to clean up a sour supermarket potato salad. If you know the trick to quickly caramelize onions, then caramelized onions are a great, sweet-tasting way to counteract vinegar flavors. They should blend easily into your salad, especially if it's got red onions in there already. Alternately, and this may seem unintuitive, but you can fight sour vinegar with another famously sour food: Try grating lemon zest into the potato salad. Zest comes from the lemon's tangy-tasting peel and will cover the vinegar with a bright taste without adding much more acidic sourness.

Besides vinegar, I've often noticed that potato salad straight from a grocery store also tends to be a little bland even when it's loaded up with vinegar to keep it fresher. To make a potato salad more interesting, Hayworth again recommends Greek yogurt as a flavor enhancer alongside chopped bacon or hot honey (honey mixed with something spicy like chili flakes). Honey mustard also works in potato salad. According to Hayworth, other flavor enhancers "can be juiced ginger, smoked paprika, and turmeric for extra umami flavor. Add smoked pepper and it's even better." Since potatoes are such a mild-tasting base, it can be a good place to practice balancing out powerful flavors and spices, and vinegar is a worthy foe in this regard.