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Recipes

I Reverse Engineered Potato Salad from Dining Hall Ingredients

This article is written by a student writer from the Spoon University at U Conn chapter.

Like many other human beings, I frequently develop sudden and insatiable cravings for potato salad. However, I cannot always be certain that I will be able to acquire it at the moment when such a craving strikes. Thus, I have devised a certain procedure by which I might be able to acquire this particular blend of tasty tubers and creamy mayonnaise.

Deconstructing a prepared food item and reorganizing it into potato salad has truly been a humbling experience, one that has brought me far closer to you, my fellow earthlings, than I had previously believed my physiology to be capable of. Please join my on my journey as I produce the traditional and highly popular human dish known as “potato salad”. This will serve to satisfy two very typical needs of human individuals: the drive to create and the powerful sensation of hunger.

By preparing the dish from ingredients found at the so-called “dining halls” that can be found at many human institutions of higher learning, I hope to make the recipe accessible to a large group, as I truly hope you will all follow in my footsteps and reproduce this from the detailed instructions presented below. With that, I present my methodology for the construction of a reverse-engineered potato salad in the form of a “recipe,” a format which many humans use to glean knowledge of culinary practices.

Reverse-Engineered Potato Salad

Difficulty:BeginnerPrep time: 5 minutesTotal time: 5 minutesServings:1 servings

Ingredients

Instructions

  1. Eli Udler

    Prepare your mise en place. Cut SPP into manageable chunks. Note that, for this, potatoes au gratin, home fries, potato pancakes and roasted potatoes all work very well. Also note that mixing products adds to flavor complexity. Chop egg, pickle and pepper/celery.

  2. Eli Udler

    Toss ingredients with mayo and mustard until evenly coated. Serve and enjoy.

As has been shown, potato salad is a dish that is worth making in your home or college dormitory, even if all you have is food you borrowed from a dining hall. I invite you to review my procedure, suggest improvements and spread the word about this counter-intuitive method of acquiring potato salad.

The humble potato, though often ignored and written off as bland in its base form, acquires new life as the star of a salad, drenched in creamy mayonnaise and zesty mustard and augmented with the richness of hard-boiled eggs and the crunch of vegetables. Truly, this is an inspired variant of the classic potato salad, adding unique textural elements while preserving the aspects that make the dish great. Accepting a variety of potato products also makes the dish extensible. It can be constructed from the simplest boiled potato or the most grand duck fat confit potato.

Either way, the contrasting components meld to provide a unique taste experience worthy of the title of a potato salad. I believe that you will find this implementation of the dish toothsome and suitable to your taste. Please share it with your friends so they may also have an easy-to-make potato salad recipe at their disposal.

Eli Udler

U Conn '19

Hi, I'm Eli