The Canned Pantry Item We Never Thought To Add To Potato Salad

Potato salad is a simple dish; nothing more than seasoned, cooked potatoes when you reduce it to the bare essentials. But that's the salad's greatest strength. It allows you to get incredibly creative with your recipes, mixing and matching ingredients and employing various types of potatoes (not to mention cooking methods) to create something wholly unique to you.

One of the more unexpected pantry ingredients you can base a potato salad recipe around, or just toss into your current favorite store-bought option, is canned corn. It adds a burst of sweetness when you bite into the toothsome kernels, plus the little pops of yellow color make the dish all the more appealing. However, there are two types of canned corn that shouldn't be used interchangeably.

Canned whole kernel corn is suspended in water, letting you strain it away to add the golden flavor nuggets inside to almost any recipe. Canned cream corn, on the other hand, is packaged with the milk-like substance you can scrape from the cob after cutting off the kernels, plus some sugar. It's best used in recipes that need that extra creamy sweetness.

Before you toss any old can of whole kernel corn into your potato salad, you must first decide on one of the many versions of canned corn brands you can find at the store. Most of them have only minor differences, such as being sweeter than others, having no added salt, or being fire-roasted before canning.

The best potato salad recipes to add these kinds of canned corn to are creamy and thick, so the kernels have something to stick to. Otherwise, they'll slide off your potatoes and congregate at the bottom of the bowl. That's not the end of the world, though; you can scoop them up with chips.

There's one more kind of canned whole kernel corn to consider: the type with added ingredients. These can be tricky to include, but they can also greatly improve the right recipes. For example, canned corn with chipotle peppers gives more heat to a spicy yam potato salad.

Outside of brands making small tweaks, such as slightly more or less sugar to make the product their own, most canned cream corn is the same. There's no need to hunt for different kinds, unless you love a specific brand.

With canned cream corn in hand, the biggest question is how much of the "cream" you use. It's a strong substance with plenty of flavor. Unless you're making a huge amount of potato salad, it's doubtful you'll use all of it. You also don't want to use too much, or you risk making more of a potato soup.

The best potato salad recipes to use it in are ones that mash the potatoes, either partly or completely. This lets you get the delicious cream well-mixed with your other ingredients, and makes it easier to gauge your moisture levels so you don't use too much. This doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't use it in chunky potato salad. It can be a great addition to French-style potato salad, for example. But, like whole kernel, much of it will sink to the bottom.