Today is National Potato Day. Why not have some potato chips or hash browns, and top them with one or both of these easy-to-make dips/sauces? They’re great on chips, on a baked potato, or in a potato salad—or with just about any vegetable or thick stew. I also like them on toasted bread, such as Eddie Doucette’s potato bread.

I’m winding down the Semiquincentennial posts, but if you’re not, consider Thomas Jefferson’s potato pie for this potato day as well.

The Joy of Chips Dip

Servings: 8
Preparation Time: 10 minutes
Irma S. Rombauer
The Joy of Cooking (1943) (Internet Archive)

Ingredients

• 8 oz yogurt
• 2 cloves garlic
• 2 tbsp butter
• ¼ tsp coarse salt
• ½ tsp smoked paprika
• 1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
• 1-2 tbsp nutritional yeast (optional)

Steps

1. Finely chop garlic.
2. Fry garlic in hot butter over medium-low heat until golden brown.
3. Pour into the yogurt and mix well.
4. Add Worcestershire, paprika, yeast, and salt, mixing well each time.

Potato chips and chip dip are a lot like hot dogs and buns: there’s always one left when the other runs out. I’m the kind of person who runs out of dip long before I empty a bag of chips. What I need is a jar of endless dip! So I was overjoyed to find that Irma Rombauer’s chip dip in The Joy of Cooking isn’t just easily-made and easily-proratable but also very flavorful.

Work to a smooth paste:
Roquefort cheese or soft cream cheese
Season it with:
Worcestershire sauce
Paprika
Spread it on:
Crispy potato chips

This turns out to work very well with Greek yogurt instead of cheese, especially if the yogurt is turned into a soft cream cheese consistency by draining it overnight. In a hurry, however, there’s no need to even do that. It’s a very versatile recipe; more flavors—such as, of course, garlic—are easily added. But Worcestershire sauce and paprika are a fine flavor combination on their own for good, crunchy potato chips. I also like the cheesiness of nutritional yeast in this.

Great chips deserve a great dip.

Simple chip dip, deserving of great chips.

Add some candied jalapeño, and it’s a cocktail snack!

Not a potato sauce or dip, but where I learned to drain Greek yogurt for a more cheese-like consistency.

I’m not sure if these mean extra-large or extra-fat; probably, both.

In Rombauer’s era, potato chips were still at least a bit of a novelty. Her recipe was for using them as a cocktail snack. The chips weren’t dipped, but rather topped, and then served on a tray to be eaten individually. Topping rather than dipping also makes them perfect for adding a second topping on top of the dip. I often add a candied jalapeño slice, but a slice of olive would be good, too. Maybe a slice of date, or a cherry tomato. Or perhaps even a bit of caviar for period-authentic flavors.

I haven’t tried that variation. But having just written it, it sounds like a great idea.

Garlic-Rosemary Sauce

Servings: 4
Preparation Time: 10 minutes
Sonia Uvezian
The Book of Yogurt (Internet Archive)

Ingredients

• 8 oz yogurt
• 2 cloves garlic
• ¼ tsp salt
• 1 tbsp fresh rosemary

Steps

1. Crush the garlic with the salt to a paste.
2. Chop the rosemary fine.
3. Crush rosemary and mash into the garlic.
4. Mix in the yogurt.

A great sauce for fried potatoes, whether potato chips or hash browns, is Sonia Uvezian’s garlic sauce from her Book of Yogurt. The recipe calls for mashing the garlic with salt, and the technique is critical. If you’ve ever watched Jacques Pépin mash garlic, you’ll have heard him talk about how important mashing garlic is vs. merely chopping it in releasing its flavor.

Mashing the garlic with the salt improves the flavor even further. I first ran across that technique in Madelain Farah’s Lebanese Cuisine, as the beginning of a (wonderful) tomato and onion salad. I included this salad in my Traveling Man’s Cookery Book.

A marvelous community cookbook filled with “exotic” spices.

Amazing collection of Middle Eastern recipes, with a focus on Lebanese-Armenian, all using yogurt.

Rosemary grows well even in Texas heat.

Garlic, yogurt, and salt is also good with carrots… but not on National Potato Day!

Bülben Hofman was born in Ankara, and was the wife of the German ambassador to Algeria and Morocco. This is a marvelous cookbook.

Only a few days after making Uvezian’s garlic sauce, I made a carrot salad from Bülben Hofmann’s Islamic Cuisine and it used the same technique for the garlic as well as the same combination of garlic, salt, and yogurt, this time attributed to Turkey. Basically, Hofmann’s recipe made the same garlic sauce as Uvezian and then mixed it with shredded, fried carrot and onion.

I’d bet that shredded, fried potato and onion would be even better.

In this case, it’s probably easier to mash the garlic with a large knife and chop coarsely, as Pépin does; then mash the garlic and salt together in the chip dip bowl, using a fork, for the full Middle Eastern flavor.

Uvezian offers an herbed variation with mint as the herb. I haven’t tried that, but I have tried basil, and I’ve tried rosemary. Both are flavorful. My rosemary variation is especially appropriate for potatoes.

This sauce is also good on just about anything that could use a cool, garlicky, creamy topping. Uvezian writes that her sauce is “A traditional accompaniment to many Middle Eastern and Caucasian dishes, particularly lamb and vegetables.”

Potatoes are a vegetable. This would be a very nice accompaniment to steak and potatoes.

You will not be seeing this Italian barley and potato soup on a future Potato Day. Far too much barley and not enough potato. But the garlic sauce helped a lot.

The garlic sauce is also very nice as the filling of a French omelet.

A spinach salad from Bülben Hofmann’s book, also goes well with garlic sauce. One begins to suspect that garlic makes everything better.

Drain the yogurt to make it cheese-like by suspending it over a measuring cup or bowl.

The problem I have with making hash browns is that for the rest of the day I get hungry from the smell every time I walk into the kitchen.

For a creamier spread, you can strain the yogurt first, turning it into a sort of light cream cheese. I discovered strained yogurt in a 1985 community cookbook from the India Association of Indianapolis. The recipe was for a simple and elegant dessert called Shrikand from contributor Nivedita Rangnekar. To make the yogurt more creamy, almost like cream cheese, wrap yogurt in cheesecloth, hang over a tall dish or measuring cup, and let drain in the refrigerator overnight. In a pinch, I’ve just let it drain on the countertop for an hour or two.

If you have a skewer easily available, that’s probably the easiest way to hang the cheesecloth above the measuring cup. I store my skewers with my barbecue stuff, so I find it easier to use a sharp-pointed chopstick or two. A long nail ought to work as well.

The yogurt loses about 10% of its weight from draining, so plan accordingly.

Both of these recipes are easily varied with your favorite herbs and spices. A little onion added to the chip dip, or dill to the sauce, are two obvious possibilities.

Rosemary appears to be a good gardening option for non-green-thumbed people like me. They seem at least a little resilient in the Texas heat, tolerant of longer trips without watering, and grow large enough to provide unending flavor.

Shrikand (Almond-Cardamom Pudding)

Servings: 4
Preparation Time: 15 minutes
Nivedita Rangnekar
Review: Exotic Cooking of India (Jerry@Goodreads)

Ingredients

• 1 lb yogurt
• ½ cup sugar
• ½ tsp cardamom powder
• 1 tsp rose water (optional, or ⅓ tsp almond extract)
• 5-6 almonds
• pinch of saffron

Steps

1. Drain yogurt in a cheesecloth for about 4 to 5 hours.
2. Blanch almonds in hot water, peel, skin, and chop.
3. Optionally, toast the almonds.
4. Add saffron to a tablespoon of hot water.
5. Combine yogurt, sugar, cardamom, rose water, and saffron.
6. Blend well.
7. Serve cold, topped with almonds.

Nivedita Rangnekar’s shrikand is not in any way meant as a potato accompaniment, but it can be paired with salty potato chips for an interesting sweet and salty snack. The rose water can be made with any roses you have on hand, although I’m far from confident that my guess at how rose water is made is period-authentic. You can also replace rose water with almond flavor or with nothing at all.

But the real reason I’m providing it here is for the instructions on making yogurt cheese. This is where I learned the technique, and it’s a wonderful one to know. I’ve been watching old episodes of Graham Kerr’s Kitchen and he uses it quite a bit, for all sorts of sauces and desserts.

If you don’t have yogurt on hand and you don’t want to brave the National Potato Day crowds at the grocer, you might also be able to use sour cream as a substitute. But whatever you use as a base, if you like garlic and you like chips and dip, try these today. They’re both great on potatoes of any kind—except potato pies!