This French Sauce Is The Ultimate Upgrade For Your Potato Salad

When you walk into a summer barbecue, there are a few dishes you'll almost be sure to find: Grilled meats, grilled vegetables, and a heaping bowl of potato salad. Most often, potato salad is served as a side dish to accompany the main course. Although there are more and more variations of potato salad, they can sometimes fall victim to a lack of seasoning, dressing, or flavor kick. A classic potato salad dressing usually involves either mayonnaise or Dijon mustard. But what if there was another French sauce that would upgrade your potato salad to the kind that you can serve as the main course? Sauce gribiche (pronounced "grib-eesh") may just be the potato salad upgrade you didn't know you needed.

Gribiche is a creamy French sauce with Dijon mustard, hard-boiled eggs, vinegar, and mixed herbs. It shares similarities in ingredients with its well-known French cousin, tartar sauce, although the flavors, textures, and preparation are entirely different. With its creamy and textured consistency, sauce gribiche's tangy and bright flavors make the perfect sauce to coat your next potato salad. Although making gribiche from scratch takes a few steps, the result is worth it. Emulsify your egg yolks with Dijon mustard and oil to reach a creamy consistency, then add your vinegar, herbs, and finely chopped egg whites.

The easiest way to elevate your salad with sauce gribiche is to substitute it for whichever potato dressing you usually use. If you're not already, consider adding onion, capers, cornichons, parsley or tarragon into your potato salad as this is similar to ingredients found in sauce gribiche. If you're not a big fan of capers but still want to add some zing to your salad, drizzle over some lemon juice or vinegar.

Gribiche's signature feature is the chunkiness of the sauce, thanks to the chopped eggs and other herbs. This will add a beautiful texture to the potatoes, which they lack on their own. If you would like to maximize that mouthfeel, consider adding elements such as crispy bacon pieces or more chopped hard-boiled eggs to elevate the texture of your potato salad.

When mixing sauce gribiche with your potato salad, make sure your potatoes are completely cooled to prevent the sauce from melting. Once you've added all your ingredients and gribiche to your potato salad, refrigerate it for at least 4 hours, ideally overnight. The longer your potato salad and sauce have been in the fridge together, the more pronounced the flavors will be.

Potatoes are neutral in flavor, making them the perfect canvas for adding a range of flavor profiles, including those in sauce gribiche. Sauce gribiche can upgrade your potatoes by adding acidity from the vinegar, tanginess from the capers, and spiciness from the mustard. The creamy, thick consistency is also a great way to ensure it won't end up on the bottom of the bowl. Instead, you'll have potatoes that are evenly coated and flavored with sauce.

Apart from potato salad, consider using gribiche as a dressing in other salads as well. Any seafood salads like a smoked salmon or avocado shrimp salad would work well with the tangy and rich flavors in sauce gribiche. The acidity in this sauce will balance out the salty and briny flavors in seafood and reduce any heavy fishy taste. Experiment by adding the sauce to your roasted or crispy vegetable salad to elevate the charred flavor notes with the creamy and bright dressing. Although there are many condiments to consider adding to your fried chicken or fried fish, sauce gribiche is a good contestant. The combination of fried food with a creamy sauce like gribiche is a great way to make sure there are no dry bites, and it might just have you drooling for more.