Leftover Potato Salad Wants to Be Roasted

It’s the day after a company picnic or summer barbecue and somehow, you’ve ended up with a bucket of leftover potato salad. You can pack it in lunch boxes and serve it as a side as is, but not everyone is made for eating the popular picnic staple meal after meal.

If you find yourself fantasizing about chucking the rest of it down the garbage disposal, don’t. Much like roasted coleslaw, you can give new life to the cold side dish with no extra ingredients: All you need is a little heat.

Recipes for potato salad and roasted potatoes are startlingly similar. Both call for chunks of potato, oil of some kind, and seasonings; the only real difference is that potato salad stops short of the oven. Don’t get tripped up on the mayo; it’s mostly oil, with some egg, sugar, vinegar, and seasonings, and all of these ingredients roast beautifully. The egg adds richness, the sugar caramelizes—it’s all very delightful.

This tip is best suited for simpler salad recipes—those that call for hardboiled egg would be interesting, to say the least—but any celery, onion, herbs, and meaty bits will only add to depth of your dish.

How to roast leftover potato salad

To try it at home, simply roast the leftovers for half an hour at 220°C in an oven or toaster oven, shaking every ten minutes until the potatoes are golden brown. You can also toss it in the air fryer at 190°C for 15 minutes, shaking every five minutes. If you loathe to heat up the kitchen with all that oven action, take it outside and sauté the spuds in a cast iron skillet on the grill. And boom: It’s a whole new side dish. (Once you’ve had your fill of roasted potato salad, try roasted coleslaw; roasted mayo is pretty good, as it turns out.)