Easy Creamy Potato Salad

This is hands down our family’s favorite potato salad recipe! It’s easy, uses simple ingredients, and the dressing is so good you’ll be licking the bowl clean.

We’ve been making this potato salad recipe for years. It’s perfectly creamy and always gets rave reviews from friends. In fact, we love this potato salad dressing so much that we even use it for our more herby red potato salad and turn it into a dip for roasted fingerling potatoes. If you take one thing away from this page, jot down how to make our dressing!

Beyond how delicious it is, this dish comes together in no time and even gets better as it sits. If you are looking for something slightly different, try our no mayo herb potato salad made with a lighter vinaigrette, or this warm German potato salad tossed in a bacon-mustard dressing.

Key Ingredients

• Potatoes: Small, waxy, thin-skinned potatoes are best for potato salad. We especially love small Yukon Gold potatoes (which are pictured). They cook quickly, and since they are small, we boil them whole, which means less prep time! Russets or baking potatoes work, but the texture is a bit different, and you will need to cut them before cooking.
• Vinegar: The secret to the best tasting potatoes! We sprinkle apple cider vinegar over the potatoes while they are still warm, which makes them taste incredible in the salad. Trust us on this one. If you don’t have apple cider vinegar, white wine vinegar, or even pickle brine works well.
• Celery and Pickles: Both add a nice, fresh crunch. Our family LOVES dill pickles, so we always add them, but you can leave them out or swap in sweet pickles (try bread and butter pickles).
• Red Onion: We love a little onion in our salad and like to “deflame” them before tossing them in. It’s a simple trick that helps take the raw edge off (we explain exactly how to do this below).
• Hard-Boiled Eggs: Eggs are an absolute must for us in a classic potato salad, but you can easily leave them out if you aren’t a fan. Here is our foolproof method for how to cook hard-boiled eggs if you need it.
• Fresh Herbs: We love plenty of fresh dill and parsley in this, but feel free to add more or different herbs if that’s more your style.
• The BEST Potato Salad Dressing: It has only 3 ingredients and tastes so good we usually end up licking the bowl. Mayonnaise and sour cream make our dressing extra creamy without being too heavy, while yellow mustard adds a bright kick of flavor and color. (We usually use Dijon mustard in our recipes, but classic yellow mustard wins here!). As for substitutions, plain yogurt works wonderfully as a substitute for sour cream, and using homemade mayonnaise makes this extra special.

Find the full recipe with measurements below.

How to Make the Best Potato Salad

We’ve made this potato salad recipe so many times, and we haven’t fallen out of love with it yet. Here are our top tips for making it the absolute best:

Tip 1: Cook small potatoes whole in salted water. Instead of peeling and chopping raw potatoes, cook small whole potatoes in salted water until tender. We do this with most of our potato recipes (see how we make mashed potatoes, for example). Cooking smaller potatoes whole keeps the inside of the potatoes fluffier and prevents them from getting waterlogged.

→ Don’t skip the salt! Salting the water generously is really important here. Potatoes need quite a bit of salt to be properly seasoned, so be generous when adding it to your pot.

Tip 2: Use an ice bath. Once your potatoes are tender, transfer them to an ice bath. We aren’t chilling them completely, just speeding things up so we can move on with making our potato salad.

When the potatoes are cool enough to handle, but still warm in the middle, you’ll be able to slip the skins right off (watch our video to see us do it!). Once the peels are off, chop them and move on.

Tip 3: Sprinkle vinegar over the warm potatoes. This is the secret weapon for amazing potato salad! While your peeled, chopped potatoes are still warm, sprinkle them generously with apple cider vinegar.

→ Why this works: This trick, inspired by Alton Brown, makes the potato flavor really pop and adds a lovely tang to the salad that perfectly balances the creamy dressing.

Tip 4: Make our creamy dressing. It’s quick and easy. Simply stir your mayo, sour cream, and yellow mustard together in a bowl. Once this dressing hits the warm, vinegary potatoes, the whole dish really comes together.

Tip 5: Deflame your onions. So we use this trick a lot (see our guacamole recipe and creamy pasta salad as examples). After chopping them, add your onions to a bowl of cold water and leave them there for 5 to 10 minutes. Drain, rinse, then use as usual in the recipe.

→ Why this works: This quick step tones down the harsh, raw onion flavor (the one that gives you onion breath). We learned it from Rick Bayless a long time ago, and it has forever changed how we work with raw onions.

Tip 6: Let the salad sit. Potato salad gets better over time. Once you toss everything together, we recommend allowing your salad to sit in the fridge for at least 30 minutes (or even making it a day ahead).

This gives the flavors time to meld and mingle, creating a far more delicious dish. This is why we will always count this as one of the best make-ahead side dishes, ever!

Our Favorite Ways to Serve Potato Salad

While potato salad is the most popular during the warmer months, our family actually makes this recipe year-round. Because the creamy potato salad dressing is so good, it’s fantastic on the side for all your favorite cookout dishes like burgers, veggie burgers, chicken burgers, beer brats, grilled steak, cedar plank salmon, and more!

We also love spooning it next to heartier, comforting main dishes. It is an absolute hit served right next to a batch of slow-cooker pulled pork (or oven pulled pork if you don’t have a slow cooker), a simple roasted chicken, or a giant rack of ribs—our baked pork ribs, beef ribs, and even braised short ribs are all excellent.

More Summer Side Dishes

This also works so well with other sides. Here are some of our favorites to serve next to the potato salad:

• Pasta Salad
• Corn Salad
• Easy Bean Salad
• Watermelon Feta Salad
• Caprese Salad
• Cucumber Salad
• Shrimp Salad