This Creamy Cheese Is What Your Potato Salad Has Been Waiting For (It's Not Cheddar Or American)

Potato salads are a classic summer food. While there are plenty of ways to make potato salads more exciting, the basic math for a great one remains the same. First, you need waxy potatoes for the salad. Next, make sure you properly emulsify your creamy salad dressing and add a little sharpness to the mayo with vinegar. But there's an additional trick to kick the starchy side up a notch without getting into loaded salads and complex mix-ins — Boursin cheese.

This soft French cream cheese was devised from a traditional fromage frais base. As long as it's added to warm potatoes, Boursin should blend well with the emulsified mayonnaise and acid mixture that creates the backbone of any good potato salad. Other cheeses aren't so forgiving — it would be far more difficult to melt even a soft sliced cheese into the dressing evenly. While you could use American-style cream cheese such as Philadelphia, it wouldn't deliver the tang of fromage frais or the flavor punch of Boursin. 

Boursin's flavors are basically a shortcut to everything you want in a potato salad, too. The tangy, creamy cheese comes mixed with aromatic herbs and garlic, so it adds bright, zingy flavors to potato salads with almost zero effort. The aromatics are perfect for keeping things interesting in a dish that can be bland if handled badly, and they make the potatoes and mayo combo surprisingly light and appropriate for the summer cookouts it's so often made for.

Garlic-and-herb-flavored fromage frais was cheese maker and business founder François Boursin's original invention way back in 1957. But the innovation didn't stop there. Today, the iconic rolls of cheese come flavored with a variety of herbs, spices, and other flavorful ingredients, including truffle and black pepper. 

These variations on the classic would work very well with potato salad, offering new angles on a classic dish. Truffle adds depth and elegance, with flavors that fit winter just as well as summer. It would be complemented by the crunch and sweetness of fried onions and a little Dijon mustard (the only appropriate mustard for potato salads). Black pepper, on the other hand, offers a clear, warm base. You could draw out the ingredient's heat by throwing in some other toasted spices like mustard seeds, pink pepper, or cumin, but this Boursin variant would also be a great canvas for classic additions like chives, parsley, and the gherkins' tiny cousin: the cornichon.  

As potato salad is such a crowd-pleasing dish at cookouts (as well as potlucks and dinner parties), catering to as wide a crowd as possible is often important. The Bel Group, Boursin's parent company, produces a vegan version of its flagship herb-packed fromage frais-based cheese, which opens up options. With a jar of plant-based mayo and a roll of plant-based Boursin, tweaking the salad for vegan friends is easy, even for avowed omnivores.