1 lb. potatoes – baked, boiled, or roasted – you can peel them too but I didn’t – I simply washed them, cut them in cubes, tossed with a bit of olive oil, and roasted them in a 400 degree F oven for about half and hour.
Once the potatoes have cooled, mix them with:
½ cup sour cream (The original recipe called for ¾ cup but I could see that this was going to be too much – even the ½ cup was too much for my preference)
½ cup mayonnaise
(Note: I still found this to be way more “dressing” than was needed for this many potatoes but I tend to like my potato salad less “dressed” than some do. You might want to start with ¼ – 1/3 cup of each to begin with and increase from there as needed to your taste. The potato salad was still incredibly tasty even with this much dressing on it though – I would just prefer less and hey it would reduce some of the massive amounts of fat in this recipe too right? I know, I know, I could use fat-free mayo and sour cream but ummm, yuck!)
One recipe I saw also called for ¼ cup of Ranch dressing to be added to this but I am not a huge fan of Ranch so I don’t keep it in the house and I didn’t want to buy it just to use ¼ cup of it in this. Also, again it would have added way too much dressing to this salad. It was one of the best potato salads I’ve ever had even without the Ranch dressing but if you like Ranch you might prefer to add some.
6-8 slices bacon, cooked and cut into small pieces (I like the precooked bacon in this but I have seen some recipes for this dish where they actually added a bit of the bacon grease to the dressing so if you are going to do that, you will want to make freshly cooked bacon.)
½ – 1 cup shredded cheese (I like the higher amount)
¼ – 1/3 cup minced onion (amount as per your taste) – I used Vidalia onions because I love the taste so much but green onions as called for in several of the recipes I saw would be good here too.
Salt and pepper to taste
Optional seasonings: paprika, garlic powder, celery salt or seasoned salt in place of the regular salt, bourbon pepper blend in place of the black pepper (note: I didn’t include any of these)
Another optional ingredient which I didn’t use and doesn’t exactly fit with the whole “loaded baked potato” theme would be some minced celery. I am not even a huge fan of celery but I do like the taste of it in potato salad and I think it could add a nice dash of flavour to this dish.
Also, several of the recipes I based this on, either didn’t add the bacon and cheese until just prior to serving or they reserved part of it to garnish the top of the salad with. I just threw it all in at once and it was great the way it was but if I were serving this to guests, I probably would reserve some for topping to make a prettier presentation.
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