Our Italian potato salad recipe with olives, capers, anchovies and rucola makes a fantastic year-round potato salad with quintessential Mediterranean ingredients. Serve it as a warm potato salad in winter and autumn, allowing the peppery rucola to wilt, or as a cold potato salad in summer and spring, chilling it in the fridge and arranging the arugula leaves just before serving.
This Italian potato salad recipe will make you one of our best potato salads, a warm potato salad with olives, capers, anchovies and rucola – or arugula to our American readers. While it’s one of many Italian potato salads I fell in love with during our travels in Italy, with those quintessential Mediterranean ingredients it could come from any Mediterranean country.
Although I adore eating this Italian potato salad while it’s still warm – and who doesn’t love a warm potato salad? They’re a fantastic accompaniment to so many winter mains and this German potato salad recipe makes one of my favourite warm potato salads – it’s really a great year-round salad. In spring and summer, you can refrigerate it, chill it, and pull it out of the fridge just before serving it.
Like the Italian green beans recipe we recently shared, this Italian potato salad is the perfect accompaniment to Mediterranean style braised chicken, juicy pan-roasted brined pork chops, chicken cacciatore, or even chicken schnitzel or chicken parma. It would also be fab with côte de bœuf.
If you’re a potato salad lover like I am, do browse that collection of our best potato salad recipes that I linked to above. We’ve got recipes for a Japanese potato salad, Burmese potato salad, my baboushka’s beetroot potato salad, and the Spanish potato salad that’s a popular Spanish tapas.
Definitely try this warm potato salad with anchovies, capers, chives and celery leaves, which could very well be a cousin to our Italian potato salad recipe. It makes a fresh green Mediterranean style potato salad with a zingy dressing of lemon juice, extra virgin olive oil and sherry vinegar.
Now before I share our Italian potato salad recipe, I have a favour to ask. Grantourismo is reader-supported. If you’ve enjoyed our recipes, please consider supporting Grantourismo by supporting our Cambodian cuisine history and cookbook on Patreon, which you can do for as little as the price of a coffee.
Or you could buy us a coffee and we’ll use that money to buy cooking ingredients for recipe testing; buy a handcrafted KROK, the best mortar and pestle ever; or buy something from our Grantourismo store such as gifts for food lovers or fun reusable cloth face masks designed with Terence’s images.
Other options include using links on our site to buy travel insurance, rent a car or campervan or motorhome, book accommodation, book a tour on Klook or Get Your Guide or buy something on Amazon, such as these cookbooks for culinary travellers, classic cookbooks for serious cooks, travel books to inspire wanderlust, and gifts for Asian food lovers and picnic lovers. We may earn a small commission but you won’t pay extra.
Now let me tell you all about this Italian potato salad recipe made with olives, capers, anchovies and rucola.
Italian Potato Salad Recipe with Olives, Capers, Anchovies and Rucola
This Italian potato salad recipe will make you a wonderful year-round potato salad with olives, capers, anchovies, and rucola – or arugula if you prefer – and it was actually a pot of end-of-season rucola growing on our balcony that had to be used, which reminded me of this Italian salad. I haven’t had it in years.
It has to be said that there’s no single Italian potato salad recipe, just as there’s no one American potato salad, Australian potato salad or English potato salad, and so on. In fact, there are probably scores of Italian potato salads.
Over the years, I’ve spotted Italian potato salads made with tomatoes, red onions, green beans, boiled eggs, artichokes, even octopus, which is another of our favourite potato salads, and we’ll be sharing that recipe soon.
Probably the only thing I haven’t seen in an Italian potato salad recipe is mayonnaise. Traditionally, Italian potato salads are made with extra virgin olive oil. If there’s an Italian potato salad with mayo, it probably arrived with the Habsburgs from Austria.
Just a few tips to making this Italian potato salad recipe as it’s one of the easiest potato salad recipes you’ll ever make.
Tips to Making this Italian Potato Salad Recipe
I only have a few tips to how to make this Italian potato salad recipe as it really is super easy and comes together quickly, like that Italian green bean recipe that I linked to, above. They’re great companions if you’re feeding a crowd.
Start with the Potatoes
I use baby potatoes or new potatoes, partly as they cook so quickly but also because they have so much flavour. Keep the skins on to retain that flavour and start them in cold water so they could evenly, making sure there’s plenty of salt in the water. Don’t worry, there’s not much in the dish.
My potatoes take 20 minutes, but check your’s a little earlier in case your potatoes are smaller or your heat is hotter. Just pierce the potatoes with a skewer and if it slides in easily they’re ready.
Once the potatoes are ready, drain them, quickly run them under a cold water tap only to cool them enough to touch, then peel off the skins, slice them in half, and toss them into the bowl with the dressing, olives, capers and rucola.
But I’ve got ahead of myself. While the potatoes are boiling, you can prep the dressing.
Make the Dressing
My Italian potato salad recipe calls for the simplest dressing of extra virgin olive oil, Jerez vinegar, sea salt, and white pepper. Why? Because the other ingredients are packed with so much flavour. Rucola is peppery, you’ve got fruity, juicy Kalamata olives, briny capers from Pantelleria that taste of the sea, and salty anchovies loaded with umami.
You’ll note that I use a lot of those ingredients, too. Because while Terence and I can easily polish off this potato salad between us, if you’re serving a main and another salad or vegetable side, this will easily feed four people, and you want each person to get a bit of everything on their fork.
Of course, less can be more and no more so than in Italian cuisine, so feel free to cut back on the measures and go for quality over quantity. Having said that, I try to use the best quality extra virgin olive oil I can source and afford, a good Jerez vinegar, and a quality sea salt.
Jerez vinegar is a Spanish sherry vinegar, not Italian, but I love it. You could use whatever wine or cider vinegar you have in your pantry. An apple cider vinegar, white wine vinegar and red wine vinegar all add brightness. I also have a tarragon flavoured wine vinegar I adore.
I use white pepper because it’s more subtle, but I like to have a pepper grinder with fresh cracked black pepper at the table, along with chilli flakes, as a little sprinkle adds a lot of warmth.
Make the dressing in a big bowl, add those quintessential Mediterranean ingredients, and a third of your rucola. Toss the potatoes in when they’re done, so they’re coated in the dressing, and the olives, capers and anchovies are mixed through, then arrange the rest of the rucola leaves on top. I also drizzle on a little more olive oil.
Serve immediately for a warm potato salad or refrigerate for chilled summery potato salad, and in that case, hold the rucola and add it just before serving. Enjoy!
Italian Potato Salad Recipe
Ingredients
- 500 g baby potatoes scrubbed
- 3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
- 2 tbsp Jerez vinegar
- ½ tsp sea salt or to taste
- ½ tsp white pepper or to taste
- 12 Kalamata olives pitted and crushed
- 2 tbsp capers
- 8 anchovies torn into a few pieces
- 24 rucola leaves
- fresh ground black pepper optional
- chilli flakes optional
Instructions
- Boil the baby potatoes in salted water for around 20 minutes until cooked; you should be able to easily pierce the potatoes with a skewer.
- While the potatoes are boiling, in a large bowl combine the extra virgin olive oil, Jerez vinegar, salt, and white pepper, add the 2 pitted and crushed olives, capers, torn anchovies, and a third of the rucola leaves, and toss to combine.
- Drain the potatoes, run a little cold water over them, peel off the skins, slice them in half, and toss them into the bowl, combining everything well. Taste, and add more salt or pepper if needed.
- If serving a warm potato salad, transfer to a serving plate immediately, arrange the remaining rucola on top and, if you like, drizzle a little more extra virgin olive oil, grind on fresh black pepper and sprinkle on some chilli flakes (optional).
- If opting for a cold potato salad, refrigerate and add the rucola and pepper/chilli flakes just before serving.
Nutrition
Please do let us know in the comments below if you make this Italian potato salad recipe with olives, capers, anchovies and rucola, as we’d love to hear how they turned out for you.
We enjoyed this a lot, but I used a lot more EVOO. It was swimming in it. I also sprinkled a lot more sea salt on. We will definitely make this again.
Hi Vera, so good to hear this! I also douse the salad in a lot more extra virgin olive oil when I’m making it for ourselves AND I also use more salt. But I know people are increasingly conscious of their sodium intake so I tend to under-season a tad and suggest that readers taste and adjust to their own palates and diets. So pleased to hear you’ll make it again. Thanks for taking the time to drop by and let us know! :)