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Czech potato salad / Cesky bramborovy salat

yahoo potato salad imageI love anything with potatoes (makes sense since it is genetically wired into my Czech genes): potato pancakes (Bramboraky), potato soup (Bramboracka), mashed potatoes (alone!), and most of all the Potato Salad! There are so many variations on this dish, and as my friend educated me the other day there is the “poor” version (potatoes, canned root of celery and mayo) and the “salad-for-the-rich” version, meaning that it includes “fancy” ingredients such as meat and eggs 🙂 I chose to do the rich version just because it tends to be more interesting and also a little more tasty:

CZECH POTATO SALAD

Ingredients:

  • 5 big potatoes
  • 1 big red onion
  • 3 large sweet pickles
  • 2 oz peas
  • 3 hard-boiled eggs
  • 1 Tbs olive oil
  • 1 Tbs Worcestershire sauce (OK, that’s not exactly the Czech ingredient here but it’s well worth it)
  • 2 Tbs pickle juice (or vinegar)
  • 3 Tbs mayonnaise
  • finely chopped fresh parsley
  • salt, pepper
  • Optional: about 4 oz of cut up ham


Method:

  1. Boil Potatoes in the skin and let them cool down
  2. Optional: peel them
  3. Dice the potatoes, ham and the hard boiled eggs
  4. Finely chop the onion, pickles and parsley
  5. Gently mix all of the ingredients together, gradually adding the olive oil, vinegar, salt, pepper and Worcestershire sauce
  6. Add the mayonnaise in and stir lightly

PS: it tastes the best when you have it the next day! A true leftover food 😉

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21 comments… add one
  • Anh Dobesova August 5, 2008, 1:29 am

    Oh yummy! Thank you for the recipe!

  • Jana August 5, 2008, 2:42 am

    There are many versions, people put generally mayo, carrots, tomatoes, peas, cucumbers etc. You can lighten it with half the mayo and half sour cream. But it depends on your taste. The potato salad with a green celery stalk is an American poor version, Czechs almost never use the stalk, mostly the celery root is used in the Czech cuisine – not for potato salad though. My recipe is as follows:
    1 kg boiled potatoes ( boiled in skin, then peeled)
    3 hard boiled eggs ( use good tasting eggs, I like Eggland’s EB or some other veg fed hen eggs)
    2 tbsp vinegar
    2 or 3 boiled carrots, chopped
    1 smaller cucumber or barrel pickles ( use only good quality pickles, I usually find German pickles to be superior quality, the American style pickles are too sweet and too artificial)
    a bit of salt
    a bit of pepper
    a bit of oil – canola, sunflower or vegetable, not olive
    Some like it with raw onions, I do not. You can finely chop an onion, if you wish.
    Potato salad is very good indeed the next day, let it sit overnight in the fridge. Dobrou chut!

  • Tanja August 5, 2008, 4:42 am

    Ahoj Jano,

    to zni vybrone/that sounds great!

    One of the recipes that I read also substituted a little bit of mustard instead of mayo…interesting. Bottom line, you can put all your leftovers in the potato salad because the next day it tastes great no matter what!

  • Oskar December 22, 2008, 8:53 am

    Hi everybody,

    that’s quite interesting recipe, even though half the ingrediences would not be used. If you ask a cook how the salad should be done properly you’d get this

    potatoes
    “roots” of carrot, celery and parsley
    vinegar
    mayo
    pickles
    onion
    mustard
    sugar, salt and pepper

    can’t tell if it is better.. the variety is great 🙂

  • Przepisy kulinarne January 2, 2009, 5:00 am

    Very interesting, but i never cook potatoes this way. Btw. I feel very hungry 🙂

  • Tanja January 4, 2009, 11:26 pm

    hi!

    you should try it! Potato salad is delicious!

  • Ellen Miriam Pedersen September 10, 2009, 3:03 am

    Hi, I enjoyed the recepe(s). The reason I looked, and found you, is I need the Czech word for potato for a play I’m writing about Prague. Is it ‘brambor’, (pl.)’ bramborach’, and is ‘bram’ = earth and ‘bor’ = apple?
    For potato salad I consider fresh cucumber essential, preferably the small, sweet version that Danes know as ‘school cucumber’; I think you can guess why.
    Thank you for being around.
    Ellen Miriam Pedersen
    Valby
    Denmark

  • Tanja September 10, 2009, 8:43 am

    Hi Ellen,

    Wow, how intriguing – play about Prague! Is it going to be a WWII play or a contemporary piece?
    As far a the word ‘potato’ goes here is the Czech translation of it:
    brambora = 1 potato (singular)
    brambory = potatoes (plural)
    bramborach = that is just a different declination version of the word ‘brambory’; we – unfortunately – have 7 different declinations of each noun.

  • Sher December 26, 2010, 1:20 pm

    Hi Tanja,
    I used your recipe for our potato salad for Christmas Eve! This is an excellent recipe. I must tell you what I did, though. Rather than using Worcestershire sauce, I accidently grabbed the bottle of soy sauce instead! The bottles resemble one another! The taste was good, but a little more salty than it should have been! 🙂

    Thanks for sharing this recipe–it was a great addition to our Christmas Eve dinner this year! 🙂

    Have a great day,
    Sher 🙂

  • Tanja December 27, 2010, 3:57 pm

    Hi Sher,

    I am so glad you liked it! By using a little more saltier sauce (soy sauce) than the “w’ sauce (I am not even attempt to spell the name) you actually proved to have Czech traits since the Czechs like A LOT of salt on their dishes 🙂

  • Kat January 7, 2011, 4:52 am

    I have a czech friend that made the best potato salad. He said it was a family secret and would not reveil the recipe. There are many variations. I made my own concoction out of the many recipes i found on line. Thank you to all that contributed to my variation of czeck potato salad. it is so delicious. There is no comparison to american or german salad. Czeck is the best.

  • Tanja January 7, 2011, 5:41 pm

    Ha! I new it – even the American says that the Czech potato salad is the best! That is yet just another little Bohemian step to the world domination …;)

  • Romana December 21, 2011, 1:12 pm

    To je sranda Tanjo,
    vsechny Vanocni recepty jse zatim stahla od tebe. Ted hledam na webu recept na Cesky bramborovy salat a hadej koho jsem nasla. Diky!!

  • Tanja December 22, 2011, 7:34 am

    Haha! No to je sranda. Doufam, ze ti ten bramborovy salat taky vydari :))

  • Ellen Miriam Pedersen December 29, 2011, 2:17 pm

    Hi Everybody,
    The above sequence landed in my mailbox a couple of days ago. Please accept my sincere condolences, those of you who are Czech nationals. One of the *brambor* recipes that my household used for Christmas. along with regular boiled ones, you probably won’t believe. They’re caramellised poms, as small and round as they come, to go with duck (no karp with speck for Xmas in the north!), filled to the brim with, in my case, prunes, apricots, and pine nuts.
    The play that I mentioned before is being rewritten – I began the rewrite during a retreat in Tonndorf just south of Erfurt. In the meantime my collection of articles (in Danish), *Golem and His Friends* has come out. ‘Golem’ is a rewrite of ‘Joseph the Golem: The Limits of Synthetic Humanity’ from 1987.
    Happy New Year, Tanja in particular, and may 2012 hold many more fine potato dishes in store for you!

  • Ivan Stastny March 30, 2012, 10:22 pm

    Nice! I make my mothers’ traditional recipe with kielbasa , dill pickles instead of sweet,
    squeeze in half a lemon, peas, finely diced onion, salt pepper, all into the mayo mix.
    After the potatoes, roll in the cut hard boiled eggs (so to not crush them).
    Garnish with tomato wedges and parsley. Beautiful !

  • Tanja April 3, 2012, 8:47 am

    mnam! That sounds yummy too…parsley is a must in each variation though 🙂

  • Anni July 31, 2015, 8:40 am

    Purrfect! Just exactly how my sadly missed, crazy wonderful dad, Zdenek, used to make it!! Thank you muchly, Anni

    PS Does anyone have the recipe for the fab cheese, paprika, anchovy etc dip he also used to make? I think one name for it, possibly Polish or Hungarian is ‘Liptauer’ – the Czech version anyone? xx

  • Tanja July 31, 2015, 7:55 pm

    Hmm….that does not sound familiar to me :(. Anyone else knows this dish?

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