German Potato Salad

Schlotzig is the Swabian word for the texture this salad is judged by: loose and glossy, every slice coated in something between stock and sauce, with no puddle underneath. It comes from potato starch rather than fat or mayonnaise, so you get there by slicing the potatoes while they are still hot and then giving the bowl a full hour at room temperature after the second pouring of stock. A watery salad has simply not stood long enough; a dry one wants a little more warm stock folded through before serving. Bavarians and Badeners say schlonzig or schlotzert for the same thing, and they all mean the same failure when it is missing.

Swabian is the version here: waxy potatoes, hot stock, vinegar, mustard, oil, no mayonnaise, served lukewarm. Bavaria builds on the same dressing but adds crisp Speck and sliced pickled cucumber with a splash of the brine, which is why the beer-garden bowl tastes smokier and sweeter beside a wedge of obatzda. North of the Main the salad is cold and bound with mayonnaise, with hard-boiled egg, apple, and pickle stirred through. Each is authentic in its own region, and none is a halfway house between the others.

Swabian recipes call for apple cider vinegar, sometimes a mild white wine vinegar, and both suit the dish better than red wine vinegar. Red is harsher against plain potato, and it stains the slices a dull grey-pink in a salad that should read pale yellow and glossy. Forty millilitres for a kilo of potatoes tastes aggressive in the pan and lands correctly in the bowl, since the potatoes swallow most of the acidity as they stand. If your vinegar is stronger than 5%, hold back a quarter of it and adjust at the end.

Two causes, and both are fixable. Either the potatoes were cold when you dressed them, in which case the starch has set and cannot take up stock, or the whole quantity of dressing went in at once and the slices had no time to absorb the second half. Peel and slice them hot, ladle on half the dressing, wait a quarter of an hour, then add the rest. Use waxy salad potatoes, labelled festkochend on German bags; floury baking potatoes turn to mash the moment the hot stock arrives, and no amount of resting will recover the slices.

Sausage is the everyday partner: bratwurst off the grill in summer, plain boiled Wiener on 24 December, and frikadellen or a schnitzel when the salad plays side dish. Kartoffelsalat mit Würstchen is the most common Christmas Eve meal in the country, named by roughly a quarter to a third of households in the annual surveys, because it can be finished hours ahead and asks nobody to stand at the stove that evening. The salad happens to want the same thing, since it only improves while it stands. Make it in the morning, leave it covered out of the fridge, and fold it once more on the way to the table.