The Condiment Shortcut You Need For Deliciously Quick Potato Salad

Tartar sauce amps up the flavor of your favorite fish and chips meal. As it turns out, it tastes supremely awesome in your potato salad recipe, too. This is mostly because of the fixins that make tartar sauce so tongue-ticklingly yummy also happen to be the types of ingredients you'd throw into your average potato salad. 

Never thought of tartar sauce as being in the same culinary family as potato salad? Here's something that might convince you that this could be your new favorite food prep shortcut. Ingredients like mayo, capers, shallots, sweet or dill pickle relish, Dijon mustard, lemon juice, and the like are common ingredients in tartar sauce. And depending on where you are in the world, your potato salad may share some of these same ingredients.

What's great about this hack is that it allows you to use up the extra tartar sauce you have leftover from your Friday night fish fry. That's a win for your wallet and for your tastebuds.

While it might be difficult to up your commercial tartar sauce's game, there's no rule that says you shouldn't try — particularly if a mean potato salad is on the line. You can start with the mayo. Add some Japanese Kewpie mayo to your tartar sauce to create a richer, thicker, and smoother texture. As it turns out, this imported mayo often finds a home in potato salads in the Land of the Rising Sun, too. 

Sriracha-infused spicy mayo would be a good option also, especially if you like your sauce to have a wee bit of a bite. Herbs like tarragon, dill, or chopped chives would work wonders here. Worcestershire sauce will infuse the creamy dressing with some umami flavor. A little vinegar, apple cider or otherwise, adds a bit of acidic balance to the mix. 

Or, if you want to turn up the pickled flavor even more, add more pickle relish — or even better yet, more capers. They're the tiny pickled flower buds that give your lox and cream cheese such spirit. Finally, it's hard to go wrong with an aromatic like minced garlic. It pretty much makes everything taste better without even trying, including your tartar sauce potato salad.