Sick Of Your Usual Potato Salad? Drizzle On This Crunchy Chinese Condiment

Potato salad is an all-American classic, but sometimes classics can get a bit boring. You see it at every potluck and barbecue, a side so ubiquitous that it's easy to feel like you've tasted it all. While the dish itself is ripe for experimentation — like the viral smashed potato variations hitting social media the past few years — you can also shake things up by using a single Chinese condiment: chili crisp.

Chili crisp layers the flavors of chili peppers, garlic, onions, and other spices in an infused oil. It delivers a robust mix of sweet, salty, umami, and acid to the palate, livened up by just the right amount of heat from the chilis. Because the ingredients are fried in the oil itself, they crisp up and add delightful texture to whatever you put the condiment on. All this nuanced complexity works incredibly well with nature's most perfect blank canvas, the honorable potato.

What really makes chili crisp stand out is its balance, which allows it to play nicely with all the additional flavors you get with potato salad. If you're going the traditional route, the creamy dressing of a potato salad tempers some of the heat from the chili crisp, letting its earthy, roasted notes shine through. If you opt for a heftier, bacon-heavy take on the salad, the garlic, onions, and heat complement all that smoky, meat goodness. Try it with any of these crowd-pleasing potato salad recipes and see how chili crisp can elevate each one.

Giving potato salad a flavor boost with chili crisp is only scratching the surface of what the condiment can do. It's persisted since its origins in China over 200 years ago, and has exploded in popularity in recent years for good reason: It just makes a whole lot of things taste better.

You can, for example, mix a spoonful or two into ramen to give the broth some extra oomph. The crunch from the crispy bits provides contrast to the soft, chewy noodles, making each bite a little more fun. Using it as a topping for ice cream takes the concept of contrasts to an extreme, mixing hot and cold, soft and crunchy, creamy and spicy, and sweet and salty to create all sorts of tasty sensations in your mouth. You can even give your fast food meal an upgrade with chili crisp, whether you embrace its heritage by using it on Chinese takeout or make your cheeseburgers punchier with a drizzle of the oil.

The best part is that you can choose from a wide variety of brands on the market, so it shouldn't be too hard to find a jar to take home. If you aren't sure about the spice levels on store-bought brands, you can make your own homemade chili crisp with this recipe, adjusting the heat as you go. You can always start with half the amount of red pepper flakes and add more until you reach your desired spice level.