Old-Fashioned Potato Salad | Plant-Based Recipes (2024)

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Published: August 18, 2018 Last Updated: June 23, 2022

You might love the plant-based version of this popular side dish better than the original!

Old-fashioned potato salad is one of my favorite side dishes. It’s rich and creamy, filled with satisfying flavors that complement a number of different main dishes. You can serve it up during a casual backyard barbecue just as easily as for a fancier, sit-down dinner party. And it certainly doesn’t hurt that it’s easy to make and doesn’t break the calorie bank, either! The only problem with classic potato salad recipes is all that mayonnaise. Even most vegan recipes are packed full of oily dressings (unless you’re using our oil-free pesto recipe, of course). So, I decided to change all of that with this Plant-Based, Old-Fashioned Potato Salad Recipe.

I love taking tried and true dishes and turning them into amazingly delicious plant-based recipes. Vegan diets are incredibly healthy and they’re a great way to lose a few extra pounds. In fact, many people have drastically changed their life just by switching to a plant-based diet. But, you don’t actually have to be vegan to love this recipe. It’s a great way to simply celebrate Meatless Monday or just make a dish that can be eaten by a wide variety of people (it’s also naturally gluten-free and dairy-free).

The recipe took me a few tries to get the perfect balance of ingredients in my oil-free, plant-based mayonnaise recipe. It didn’t come together until I discovered a secret ingredient – which I’ll tell you all about in a minute! In the end, I finally came up with a Plant-Based, Old-Fashioned Potato Salad Recipe that I think you’ll love. In fact, I recently tried this recipe out with some friends of mine. They not only dove back for seconds, but they also asked me for the recipe! Talk about music to my ears.

Plant-Based Mayonnaise for the Win

Whether you’re following a vegan diet or not, you should really reconsider using commercial mayonnaise. The stuff available on the grocery store shelves is full of soybean oil and chemicals like calcium disodium EDTA (which is also a preservative used in cosmetics). I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to put those things into my body! We have a great skinny aioli recipe that uses Greek yogurt, but we wanted to develop one that was vegan-friendly.

The mayonnaise we use for our Plant-Based, Old-Fashioned Potato Salad Recipe is ultra creamy and it actually tastes like the real deal. The secret is cashews soaked in water! We’ve used it in the past to make dairy-free sour cream, and it worked so well that I wanted to try it for this mayonnaise replacement. After soaking them overnight, the nuts plump up and become super creamy when you puree them in the blender.

This recipe couldn’t be easier to make, either. Simply toss all the mayonnaise ingredients into a high-powered blender and pulse until everything has a creamy consistency. You can even thin it out with water if you prefer a thinner mayonnaise for a more lightly-coated potato salad.

When it all comes together, we think you might like thisPlant-Based, Old-Fashioned Potato Salad Recipe better than the original recipe. It’s proof that vegan cooking can be full-flavored and absolutely delicious.

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