The Simple Ingredient Swap For The Ultimate Thai Style Potato Salad

You don't have to take a trip to your favorite local Thai restaurant to enjoy the lush kaleidoscope of Thai-inspired flavors. Save that trip to the restaurant for another day and use those tastes to whip up a quick, flavorful dish to share to take potlucks, tailgates, and backyard barbecues. To elevate your next batch of potato salad with one ingredient swap, skip the mayo and stir in a mixture of peanut sauce and unsweetened coconut milk instead.

On its own, the chief function that mild, creamy mayonnaise brings to a batch of potato salad is utilitarian. It's a moisture element and a binding agent, and it gets the job done well. But, if you're looking for a moisture-packing, ingredient-binding, knockout flavor bomb that introduces a crave-able taste all at the same time, then take a cue from your go-to Thai recipes and whip out the peanut sauce and unsweetened coconut milk. Just mix the two ingredients and fold them into your dry potato salad ingredients as normal. 

You can use either the creamy bottled peanut sauce condiment here or dry peanut sauce mix, adding slightly more unsweetened coconut milk with the latter to hydrate. For optimal creamy consistency, stir together roughly a 1:4 ratio of dry peanut sauce mix and coconut milk, adjusting the proportions to taste. If using a creamy peanut sauce condiment, feel free to experiment with the levels to get the texture how you want it.

Thai-style potato salad isn't just easy to make, it's easy on the wallet. At a Walmart in New York, a packet of dry peanut sauce mix by A Taste of Thai brand costs $2.69, and the peanut satay sauce by the same brand costs $3.39. One of these peanut sauce options combined with a can of Thai Kitchen brand unsweetened coconut milk for $2.98 shakes out to roughly the same price total as a jar of Hellmann's mayonnaise at $5.98. You can also make spicy peanut sauce yourself at home.

The flavorful potato salad upgrades don't have to end with ditching the mayo, either. Thai cuisine is known for its spicy, citrusy, herbaceous, floral flavor profile. To take your potato salad to even tastier depths, you could take a few more cues from some of the most common ingredients in Thai culinary stylings. Fiery bird's eye chilies (phrik khi nu), umami-bomb fish sauce and oyster sauce, pungent shrimp paste, coriander, turmeric, black cardamom, cumin, galangal, lemongrass, jasmine, Thai basil, and tamarind can all be mixed into your Thai-inspired potato salad. To bring some heat, you could also stir a dollop of green or red curry paste into your coconut milk and peanut sauce mixture before folding it in with the potatoes.