German Potato Salad - Straight from the German

A friend of ours inspired us to make potato salad the other night. He was telling us about his American Oktoberfest experience and said that he had the best German potato salad of his life. It has been a while since we have made a true German meal, and especially potato salad, and our stomachs got hungry just thinking about it. We decided it was time to get to work and make some potato salad for ourselves.

Map of Swabia thanks to Wikipedia

The potato salad we make is Swabian German potato salad (Schwäbischer Kartoffelsalat). We promise this is the real deal for you Americans since he comes straight from the heart Swabia (the southwest part of Germany in Baden-Württemburg). If you are German (or maybe the Americans too) and have your own recipe style let us know. We are always up for changing things around and trying again :)

This potato salad should be made a minimum of 30 minutes before you plan to eat so that the broth has time to soak in. We made our potato salad about 2 hours early so it was nice and flavorful by dinnertime.

To make our style of German potato salad you need:

About 1 kg  (around 2 pounds) potatoes
1 large onion, chopped finally
1 bell pepper, chopped finally
4 medium pickles, chopped finally
200 ml vegetable broth (potatoes should not be swimming so you might not need this much)
70 ml apple vinegar
30 ml olive oil or sunflower oil
1 Tbs hot mustard 
Pepper, salt, oregano, rosemary, parsley, basil

Boil the potatoes until they are soft enough to easily stick a fork through. Our potatoes were medium sized and took about 10 minutes.

Very easy to peel after being boiled

Dump out the potatoes into a colander, run under cold water and peel. Since the potatoes were boiled the skin will easily comes off just by rubbing them with your hands.







Cut the newly peeled potatoes into large chunks. If you like the pieces can be rather skinny, but we really like a mix of big and small pieces.


Place in a large bowl and cover with onion, pepper (any color is fine, we use red because the color looks nice with the white onion and green pickles), pickles, vegetable broth (enough that that potatoes are very wet but not swimming), apple vinegar, olive oil, mustard and a generous amount of the herbs.




We mix the mustard, olive oil, and vinegar together before adding it to the potatoes so that the mustard does not clump. Add broth on its own so if you decide not to use it all there are no other ingredients that get left out.

Stir and let sit for a minimum of 30 minutes. If you want your potato salad to be warm for serving, leave it out and serve it within 1 hour. If you do not mind it cold (like us), you can put it in the fridge and let it sit  for hours (even overnight). We think the best taste is fresh, and within 1 hour of preparing).

We recommend serving this potato salad with paniertes (breaded) schnitzel. You can find our blog post for schnitzel here.