potatos

Summer has arrived, finally, and at The Farm, that means Helen’s mother’s Czech Potato Salad is on the menu. This recipe is a delightful combination of tender potatoes, crisp vegetables, and a tangy dressing that is ideal to enjoy with loved ones at any of your summer events.

As with all our recipes, this one is incredibly versatile, allowing you to customize it to your liking. That being said, potato salad can be surprisingly technical when it comes to getting the flavor and texture just right. We suggest if you have never made potato salad before, do a few practice runs if you plan to serve it at a big event!

Note from Anna

After really watching my mom make this recipe for the first time, I would say this is on of her most intuitive recipes. She just throws it together, and measures nothing. It’s worse than soup. I’ve done my best to record what she does, but if as you are making this and you feel you need more or less of something, follow your intuition! And let us know how it goes!

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STEPS: EXPLAINED, WITH TIDBITS AND ADVICE

Fill a medium pot with water and add about a teaspoon of salt. Get that boiling for the potatoes. Also fill a 3-quart sauce pan with water and get that boiling for the eggs. While you wait for your water to boil, wash and peel about 3 pounds of Russet potatoes.

Chop the potatoes into about 1/2 inch pieces. It’s important to make them bigger so they don’t turn into mashed potatoes. The chunks will also mush down a little when you mix your salad.

Dice about 1 medium white onion, 3 ribs of celery, and 1 cup of diced dill pickles. If you like more or less of any of these things, adjust as you see fit.

Once the water is boiling, add your potatoes and boil for about 10 minutes. Add 6 eggs to your other pot of boiling water, and boil for 10 minutes until they are hard boiled. Pro tip that Anna didn’t know: use a tongs to gently drop the eggs into the water. Otherwise, they can crack and the white stuff comes out (see below). We still used these eggs, but it wasn’t ideal!

At 10 minutes, check your potatoes. You want them to be firm but not crunchy. It’s a fine line, and sometimes the only way to tell is to taste one.

Also after 10 minutes, drain your eggs and refill the pot with cold water. The most important thing with potato salad is to get your eggs and potatoes cooled down fast. Set them aside.

Once your potatoes are ready, it’s time to cool them down. You want to cool them down fast so they stop cooking and firm up for when you have to mix your salad. Through out all these steps, make sure to be gentle with the potatoes or they will start to turn into mush. Pour the potatoes into a colander or strainer from the pot and run cold water over them.

Put the potatoes back in the empty pot and cover with cold water. Set aside for 5 minutes.

Then, repeat the last step by dumping the potatoes back into the colander, rinse in cold water, and then put them back in your empty pot. Cover with cold water a second time, and set aside for 10-15 minutes.

While the potatoes and eggs are cooling, it’s time to make your dressing. In a medium bowl, mix together 1 cup Miracle Whip or whipped salad dressing, 2 tablespoons yellow mustard, 1/2 cup white sugar, and 2 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar.

Give it a taste! It should be tangy and sweet. The flavor should be powerful because the potatoes will absorb more flavor than you think and dilute your mixture. Once you have your dressing mixed, your potatoes and eggs should be cooled down enough. Peel and dice your eggs into even pieces.

Now you are ready to mix your salad! Drain the potatoes and put them in a large cake pan. This will help the potatoes cool down even faster, and the salad will be easier to mix without mushing your potatoes.

Make sure to do a sprinkle of about 1 teaspoon salt and 1/2 teaspoon pepper over the potatoes.

Next, gently mix in the onions, celery, and pickles until evenly combined.

Gently mix in the dressing until well combined.

Gently mix in eggs until well combined.

Now it’s time to taste it! The flavor should be tangy, a little sweet, and salty. The texture should be creamy and crunchy with the vegetables. If the flavor is weak or you taste mainly plain potato, mix another batch of dressing. You don’t have to make the same amount and adjust it for the flavors you are going for. You can also sprinkle the salad with salt and pepper if that’s what it needs. We did have to add more flavor to ours!

Once you get it tasting the way you want, pop your salad into the fringe to finish cooling down and to let the flavors bled. This salad is usually better the second day, so it’s never a bad idea to make it ahead of time. Serve in your favorite bowl with a sprinkle of paprika on top! Enjoy!

Helen’s Czech Potato Salad

A tangy, delicious potato salad that is great for any summer event

Prep Time1

Cook Time1

Total Time2

Servings: 8 people

Ingredients

3 lb Russet potatoes, cubed into 1/2 inch pieces
6 eggs
1 medium white onion, diced
3 celery ribs, diced
1 cup dill pickles, diced
1-2 cups Miracle whip or whipped salad dressing
2-4 tbsp yellow mustard
1/2-3/4 cup white sugar
2-4 tbsp apple cider vinegar
2-3 tp salt
1/2-1 tp pepper
paprika

Instructions

Fill a medium pot with water and add about 1 tp salt. Boil over high heat for the potatoes.
Fill a 3-quart sauce pan with water. Boiling over high heat for the eggs.
Wash and peel the potatoes. Chop into 1/2 inch pieces.
Dice the onion, celery, and pickles into small pieces.
Once the water is boiling, add your potatoes to the medium pot and add your eggs to the sauce pan. Boil both for 10 minutes.
After 10 minutes, drain your eggs and refill the pot with cold water. The most important thing with potato salad is to get your eggs and potatoes cooled down fast. Set them aside.
At 10 minutes, check your potatoes. You want them to be firm but not crunchy. When they are firm, cool them down by pouring the potatoes into a colander or strainer from the pot and running cold water over them. Put the potatoes back in the empty pot and cover with cold water. Set aside for 5 minutes. Repeat these steps a second time after 5 minutes and then set aside for 10-15 minutes. Be gentle with them throughout these steps.
In a medium bowl, mix together 1 cup Miracle Whip or whipped salad dressing, 2 tablespoons yellow mustard, 1/2 cup white sugar, and 2 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar. It should be tangy and sweet.
Once your eggs are cool, dice your eggs into even pieces.
Drain the potatoes and put them in a large cake pan. This will help the potatoes cool down even faster, and the salad will be easier to mix without mushing your potatoes.
Sprinkle potatoes with about 1 tp salt and 1/2 tp pepper.
Gently mix in the onions, celery, and pickles until evenly combined.
Gently mix in the dressing until well combined.
Gently mix in eggs until well combined.
Now it’s time to taste it! The flavor should be tangy, a little sweet, and salty. The texture should be creamy and crunchy with the vegetables. If the flavor is weak or you taste mainly plain potato, mix another batch of dressing. You don’t have to make the same amount and adjust it for the flavors you are going for. You can also sprinkle the salad with more salt and pepper if that’s what it needs.
Once you get it tasting the way you want, pop your salad into the fringe to finish cooling down and to let the flavors bled. This salad is usually better the second day, so it’s never a bad idea to make it ahead of time.
Serve in your favorite bowl with a sprinkle of paprika on top!

Intro: why this recipe

I don’t know about you but in light of what’s going on in our world right now, everything seems to take a bit more energy than it used to. That’s why we are starting with this recipe. It’s comforting, it’s simple, and the cook times (about 1 hour) give you space to catch up, empty the dishwasher, or help your child with homework, etc. That’s why it’s one of my (Anna) favorites!

Also, many of you requested Helen’s recipe for Chicken Soup with Potato Dumplings. In order to make that recipe, we need to make this one first!

A note on EFFICACY

My grandma Toinie never wasted anything in the kitchen. She used to make these casseroles where she’d mix together whatever vegetables, potatoes, and meat she had left over in the fridge, pour some gravy over it, cook it in the oven for one hour and serve it to whoever was around on The Farm that day for lunch. It sounds gross, but it was actually pretty good. Helen does similar things in her kitchen, but in a more sneaky way. That being said, if you plan to join us to make Chicken Soup with Potato Dumplings, be sure to:

Make enough extra chicken so you have two cups of shredded meat left over
Make enough mashed potatoes that you have 1 cup left over
Save your potato water

How Helen came up with this recipe

Grandma Toinie never really put much on her chicken. She just baked it with some spices. My mother always breaded our chicken. She would dip it in egg and then in flour, fry it, and then finish it in the oven. I wanted something more like my mom’s chicken, but frying for that many people is too involved. Somewhere I read that I could just add spices to the flour, coat the chicken with it, and then bake the meat, brushing it halfway through. So I starting making it that way because it was the closest I could get to my own mom’s recipe.

For the Mashed potatoes…I don’t remember. I used to put cream cheese in them, but that wasn’t very good. Don’t do that. Haha!

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Steps: Explained, with tidbits and advice

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees or 350 for a convection oven.

2. Trim extra skin and fat from 1 fryer pack or family pack of bone-in cut-up chicken (about 8 pieces of chicken.) Set aside. NOTE: This is a totally optional step. Skip it if it sounds obnoxious. Your dinner will not be ruined.

We always use bone in chicken for this recipes. You can chose whatever bone-in cuts are your favorite. I used thighs in this example. If you are going to make Chicken Soup, plan to have an extra 2 cups shredded chicken leftover.

3. In a medium bowl, combine 1 ½ cups flour, 1 tablespoon granulated garlic , 1 teaspoon seasoned salt, ½ teaspoon ground pepper, 1 teaspoon paprika. Mix thoroughly. NOTE: You can experiment with different spices or dried herbs in your flour mixture. I’d recommend Herbs De Provence or Old World seasoning. When Helen makes this chicken, she exclusively uses Old World plus the spices in this recipe, but we know not everyone can get Old World. Don’t stress. Your chicken will turn out great with just the spices in this recipe.

4. Grease a shallow baking pan or dish (a cookie sheet will work) that will fit all the chicken. Using a shallow pan will make the chicken brown more nicely than a pan with a higher side, but a 13×9 cake pan will work if that’s all you have.

5. Coat chicken on all sides with flour mixture. It should be a light coating on each side. You don’t need a lot of the flour mixture.

Do one side.

Then, the other side. Don’t coat the chicken any more than that. When I’ve worked with my mom in the kitchen, I’ve gotten in trouble for coating the chicken with too much flour. Haha!

NOTE: If you let the chicken sit in the fridge for 60-90 minutes after flouring, it browns a little better. My mom is a throw-it-together-last-minute kind of cook, so she would NEVER do that. If you have the foresight, give it a try.

Place the chicken in pan, skin-side up.

The chicken should be packed tightly together. Really, I should have had one more thigh in this picture…but there’s a pandemic on so…. 😉

You want all the pieces nestled together as close as possible.

6. Put the chicken in the oven on the middle rack and bake. Set a timer for 30 minutes.

7. While the chicken is baking, it’s time to start your mashed potatoes! Peel, wash, and dice 3 pounds of russet potatoes (or whatever potatoes you can get.) NOTE: If you don’t have a scale, one pound of peeled, diced potatoes is about 2 1/4 cups. If you are planning to make Potato Dumplings for the Chicken Soup, make sure you have an extra cup of finished mashed potatoes left over.

For the dice size, it’s up to you. Helen dices her potatoes large (a little smaller than quarters), like in this photo, because she’s making a lot usually, and she says it’s too putzy to cut them smaller. The downside is that they will take longer to cook. I dice mine in 1 inch pieces because I’m usually just cooking for 2 people. The important thing is to make sure all the pieces are around the same size so they cook evenly.

8. Put the diced potatoes in a 5 quart sauce pan. Fill it with just enough water to completely cover the potatoes. Add 1/8 teaspoon salt to the water, cover the pot, and put on the stovetop on high to boil for 15-30 minutes depending on the dice size. Poke the potatoes with a fork or knife to check them. They are done when the knife slides in easily with no resistance. NOTE: Once the potatoes start boiling, if the lid is still on, the water will boil over, so don’t wander off too far from the kitchen. You don’t need the lid once the potatoes are boiling. Put it to the side because you’ll need it later to drain the potatoes.

9. This is a great time to consider your green vegetable side. I made broccolini because I think it’s tasty, but we don’t have a farm recipe for that. A simple lettuce salad or any green vegetable boiled, steamed, or roasted works great, especially of it’s smothered in butter! Since the oven is already on and it’s almost spring, try this asparagus recipe. It’ll come out fine in a 375 degree oven (might just take a little longer).

10. When your chicken timer goes off, pull the pan out of the oven. Use the pan drippings to brush all the chicken, making sure that any dry flour spots are covered. If there are no pan drippings, use olive oil to brush chicken.

In my example, I had some pan drippings for about half the chicken. Then, I had to bust out the olive oil.

When you’re done, you shouldn’t see any flour.

11. Sprinkle the chicken with all the spices you put in your flour mixture (garlic, salt, pepper, and paprika) until it “looks right.” I know. I try to think about it like this: how much salt, garlic, etc would I want in that one bite. It’s a medium sprinkle. NOTE: For those of you who bought the cookbook, this step got left out :0

Here’s my chicken after I added the spices. The good news is that once the chicken is done, you’ll know how you did. If it’s bland, add more spices during this step. If it’s aggressively salty/garlicky, hold back a little bit next time!

12. Bake for another 20-30 minutes or until meat thermometer registers at 165 degrees.

Aside from temperature, you know it’s done when it’s nice and crispy and brown.

13. Once your potatoes are done, use the lid to drain the water into a jar or other container. Let it cool a little while before storing it in the fridge, so it doesn’t heat up your fridge and cause your other food to spoil. Potato water has lots of uses. I want you to save it for the Chicken Soup recipe.

12. Once you’ve got your potato water sorted, it’s time to mash your potatoes. At The Farm, we do them in a mixer because it’s such a large quantity. At my home, I use a hand masher, and then a spoon to mix them once they are mashed. Sometimes, I also mash my potatoes with the pot on a burner set to low so that the add-ins don’t cool the potatoes too much. It’s up to you. At The Farm, the potatoes go from the mixer to a chafing dish and then back into a warm 200 degree oven until we are ready to serve.

Steamy! Whether I’m using a hand masher or mixer, I add 2 tablespoons of butter first, and then mash them. The important thing is to NOT over mash/mix them because your potatoes will turn starchy with a glue-like texture.

13. Once they are thoroughly mashed, gently mix in 1/2 cup milk, 1 tablespoon sour cream, 1/8 teaspoon garlic powder, and 1/8 teaspoon salt. This is your starting point. Once that’s combined, taste it.

What do you think it needs?

After I added those things to my potatoes, they seemed dry to me, so I added another 1/2 cup milk and another tablespoon of butter. Then, I tasted them again. Because I added more milk and butter, I needed more sour cream, salt, and garlic because the liquids diluted the mixture. So I added more of those things. If you are nervous about overdoing it, go slow, adding a little at a time. This is a perfect moment to customize. I don’t like a lot of sour cream. My mom does. You might not want to taste the garlic out right or you might LOVE garlic and dump in a ton! Now’s your chance to play! And keep tasting as you go!

That’s better! It’s much more creamy, like I like!

14. Hopefully, your green vegetable worked out!

So how’d it go? Did you use different spices on your chicken? How did you customize your mashed potatoes? What was confusing? Do you have pictures? PLEASE SHARE! 🙂

Helen’s Baked Chicken and Creamy Mashed Potatoes

Prep Time15

Cook Time1

Total Time1 15

Servings: 6

Author: palmquistfarm

Ingredients

Baked Chicken

1 fryer pack or family pack of bone-in cut up chicken, about 8 pieces of chicken
1 ½ cup all-purpose flour
1 tbsp granulated garlic
1 tp seasoned salt
1 tp ground pepper
1 tp paprika
2 tbsp olive oil (maybe)

Creamy Mashed Potatoes

3 lbs russet potatoes
¼ to 2 tp salt
2 to 4 tbsp butter
½ cup milk
1 to 3 tbsp sour cream
⅛ to 1 tp garlic powder

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees or 350 for a convection oven.
Trim extra skin and fat from chicken (optional)
In a medium bowl, combine the flour, granulated garlic , seasoned salt, ground pepper, and paprika. Mix thoroughly.
Grease a shallow baking pan or dish (a cookie sheet will work) that will fit all the chicken. Using a shallow pan will make the chicken brown more nicely than a pan with a higher side, but a 13×9 cake pan will work if that’s all you have.
Coat chicken on all sides with flour mixture. It should be a light coating on each side.
Place the chicken in pan, skin-side up. The chicken should be packed tightly together.
Put the chicken in the oven on the middle rack and bake. Set a timer for 30 minutes.
While the chicken is baking, peel, wash, and dice potatoes
Put the diced potatoes in a 5 quart sauce pan. Fill it with just enough water to completely cover the potatoes. Add ⅛ teaspoon salt to the water, cover the pot, and put on the stovetop on high to boil for 15-30 minutes depending on the dice size. Poke the potatoes with a fork or knife to check them. They are done when the knife slides in easily with no resistance.
When your chicken timer goes off, pull the pan out of the oven. Use the pan drippings to brush all the chicken, making sure that any dry flour spots are covered. If there are no pan drippings, use olive oil to brush chicken.
Sprinkle the chicken with all the spices you put in your flour mixture until it “looks right.” I try to think about it like this: how much salt, garlic, etc would I want in that one bite. It’s a medium sprinkle.
Bake for another 20-30 minutes or until meat thermometer registers at 165 degrees. Aside from temperature, you know it’s done when it’s nice and crispy and brown.
Once your potatoes are done, use the lid to drain the water. Don't forget to save it!
Add the butter to the potatoes. Mash them with a hand masher or mixer until no lumps remain. Be careful not to overwork them or they will turn out gluey. If you want to keep them warm, mash them in the pot over a burner on low.
Once they are thoroughly mashed, gently mix in ½ cup milk, 1 tablespoon sour cream, ⅛ teaspoon garlic powder, and ⅛ teaspoon salt. This is your starting point. Once that’s combined, taste it. If they are dry, add more butter and milk. If you can't taste the salt, garlic or sour cream, add more of that. Do this little by little, and keep tasting until you've got it just the way you like it!