Czech potato salad / Cesky bramborovy salat
August 4, 2008
I 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:
- Boil Potatoes in the skin and let them cool down
- Optional: peel them
- Dice the potatoes, ham and the hard boiled eggs
- Finely chop the onion, pickles and parsley
- Gently mix all of the ingredients together, gradually adding the olive oil, vinegar, salt, pepper and Worcestershire sauce
- Add the mayonnaise in and stir lightly
PS: it tastes the best when you have it the next day! A true leftover food 
Oh yummy! Thank you for the recipe!
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!
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!