This Week's Pick: Honey Mustard Potato Salad

One recipe, ranked by engagement and ease of prep.

Of every recipe published across NYT Cooking, Bon Appétit, Serious Eats, and r/MealPrepSunday between June 1 and 7, Honey Mustard Potato Salad by Eric Kim for NYT Cooking cleared the field by a wide margin. 1

The engagement gap is hard to ignore. The recipe collected 888 five-star ratings within roughly three days of publication — more than 3.5 times the next-highest-rated new recipe this week (Chile Tofu at 247 ratings). 1 That pace is exceptional for a side dish, which typically trails main courses in raw volume. It hit fast and readers kept coming back.

The timing works, too. Fourth of July is four weeks out, Memorial Day is still fresh, and the first weekend cookouts of the summer are underway. A potato salad that's quick, make-ahead, and different enough to justify the conversation at the table fits this moment exactly.

This is not the mayonnaise-heavy potato salad of a church potluck. Kim describes the flavor profile as "lightly inspired by those delicious honey-mustard pretzel pieces from the snack aisle" — 1 meaning it's tangy, slightly sweet, and has a snack-food level of seasoning that makes it hard to stop eating.

The technique has an actual trick to it. Potatoes boil for the first half of the cooking time, then the heat is cut and they finish steaming in residual heat with the lid on. The result is creamy and pillowy rather than waterlogged or crumbly — a texture most home cooks haven't achieved with the standard boil-until-done approach. 1

Total time is 45 minutes (5 min prep, 40 min cook). The recipe makes 4–6 servings, keeps refrigerated for 3 days, and qualifies as make-ahead — which means you can build it Saturday morning and bring it cold on Sunday. 1

All 12 ingredients are standard grocery-store items — no specialty store required. 1

The dressing leans on curry powder for earthiness and yellow mustard for sharpness — not Dijon, which would push it toward a French-style vinaigrette. If you want to adjust the sweetness, readers suggest starting with slightly less honey and tasting after the first mix. The eggs fold in at the end and provide richness without making the dressing heavier.

The 888 reviewers are running a productive public beta test. Several patterns stand out. 1

One reader who made it twice in a week wrote: "You must make this!" and landed on extra curry powder plus a grainy mustard for added texture. 1 Another added 1.5 cups of chopped celery to fix a crunch problem, and reported it landed well at a gathering. The one dissenting note: a reviewer who found the garlic powder and onion powder combination too reminiscent of flavored potato chips — if you want a more restrained background flavor, reduce those two items by half on first cook.

Eric Kim's own framing sets the stakes accurately: "There exist entire worlds between a good potato salad and a bad one." 1 This one sits firmly on the good side — and the boil-then-steam method is the reason why.

Chile Tofu by Hetty Lui McKinnon (NYT Cooking, June 4) is the strongest main-dish candidate — 247 five-star ratings, 35 minutes, weeknight-friendly, and vegan. McKinnon describes it as "spicy, tangy and bold" — a vegan riff on Indo-Chinese chile paneer from Kolkata, with crispy cornstarch-dusted tofu in a ketchup-sriracha-soy sauce. 2 Readers have been swapping in hoisin for the ketchup and tomato paste for a smokier base; one air-fryer method is circulating in the comments. If you need a meatless main this week, this is your pick.

Orecchiette With Fresh Corn Alfredo (Jesse Szewczyk, Bon Appétit, June 5) is worth flagging now as a few weeks' heads-up: it calls for four ears of fresh corn, which peaks in most US markets from mid-June through August. The technique is genuinely interesting — raw corn scraped off the cob and folded into hot pasta with butter, Parmesan, and a touch of Fresno chile, where the pasta's residual heat builds the sauce without cooking the corn into mush. 3 Bon Appétit does not publish public star ratings, so there's no engagement number to point to — but the technique stands on its own.