The Thomas Keller Challenge: Potato and Green Bean Salad with Creamy Pepper Dressing

(I’m cooking once a week from Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc at Home cookbook. For more info, read my intro post on the Thomas Keller Challenge.)

This week’s Thomas Keller recipe went on the road: I brought it to a potluck dinner at a friend’s house. Unfortunately, the photos I took (outside, in the dark) of the finished salad turned out horrifically. All I’ve got is this one of the salad pre-dressing:

This is a great, summery salad, and it’s enough for six or eight, easy. As is typical for Chef Keller’s recipes, it’s got a lot of unnecessarily complicated frou-frou steps, but none of them are particularly difficult. You simmer the potatoes until tender, then boil the green beans (in an entirely separate pot for some reason) and drop them in an ice bath. Other than that, it’s just chopping lettuce, shallot, and chives. For the dressing, you reduce pepper, honey, and vinegar, and mix with buttermilk, creme fraiche, and homemade aioli.

(Full disclosure: I used yogurt instead of the creme fraiche—almost everyone at dinner was on a diet—and I mixed garlic into bottled mayonnaise for the aioli. I know homemade is better, but it’s being mixed in with so much other stuff, it didn’t seem worth it.)

Chef Keller’s method of plating this salad kinda veers into the ridiculous: You’re supposed to toss the lettuce with some of the dressing, then mix together the rest of the ingredients in another bowl and toss them with more dressing, then stack a layer of lettuce, a layer of potatoes and beans, another layer of lettuce, and another layer of potatoes and beans, followed by a garnish of fresh tarragon and chervil. Silly. Just toss the damn salad with some dressing. Same difference. (I have no objection to the herbs, but honestly who has tarragon and chervil just lying around?)

Ignoring that, though, this is a great summer salad. Fresh and crisp green beans and lettuce make a great contrast to the potato, and the creamy-tart dressing is something like a mixture of thousand island and ranch. Even with the reduction in fat from switching to yogurt, it was still quite rich. It’s a sophisticated update to your basic potato salad, and pairs well with anything grilled.