Tips for Making Perfect Picnic Sides

Before you pack your picnic haul, find out which ingredients will withstand the trek and how to prep foods for maximum outdoor enjoyment.

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What to Pack

In addition to your classic pasta and bean salads, you may want to pack some vibrant summer greens. But stay away from delicate, wilt-prone leafy salads when packing your picnic menu. Opt instead for sturdier shredded salad or slaw, which maintains crunch and improves with time. Or, try marinated cooked vegetables.

Picking Your Potatoes

Choose smooth-skinned waxy potatoes like red bliss, or a variety of smooth-skinned waxy heirlooms for making potato salad. These potatoes hold their shape when cooked, versus baking varieties, which break up and turn grainy. Leave the skins on if you want to enjoy the nutrition therein.

Dress Tastier Taters

Toss otherwise bland potatoes with your dressing while they are still warm to ensure the flavors penetrate and saturate the spuds. As the potato chunks cool, their outer layers crack, allowing oils to seep into the still-warm interior, locking all that flavor inside.

Crispy Coleslaw Secrets

Salting and draining cabbage rids it of the liquid that would otherwise end up sogging your coleslaw and dampening your picnic. (Rinse and pat dry before using.) You’ll end up with a crisper slaw that also better absorbs the dressing.

Liven Up Your Slaw

Summer provides a bounty of slaw-worthy vegetables (any that taste good raw and are relatively sturdy should make a great, interesting slaw). Try one of these, on their own or mixed with classic cabbage: thin slivers of nutritious kale, sweet julienned broccoli stems, crisp sweet kohlrabi, sharp daikon radish, sweet red slivers of beets, crunchy and tart green apple, sweet slivered carrots, or sour and juicy unripe plums.

Perfect Pasta for Salads

Undercook pastas a bit – al dente, that is – for salads. They will better absorb the vegetable juices and sauce that you use, and they will soften slightly when mixed with those ingredients. To tell whether the pasta is done, trust your teeth: The noodles should resist your bite a little, but they should not be raw.

Mellow Out Onions

Raw onions can be a bit smelly and biting, but you don’t need to cook onions to mellow them out. Soak onion slices in some cold, salted water for 15 minutes to draw out that harsh taste before adding them to salads. Everyone will thank you.

Beans: To Soak or Not?

Many insist that dry beans must be soaked before they are cooked to wash away hard-to-digest amino acids and reduce the risk of stomach upset. Others say, whether you soak beans or not, it is their high fiber content that gives them their bodily reaction-inducing claim to fame. Our culinary team has tried beans both ways, and the consensus is that pre-soaking beans reduces cooking time, while unsoaked beans more readily accept flavors from cooking liquid. (No consensus on stomach upset has been reached.)

Skimming Bean Foam

When you cook beans, a foam consisting of water-soluble proteins collects at the top of the pot. If you're of the camp that believes it is this protein that causes stomach upset, you'll want to skim this foam to prevent it from being reabsorbed by the beans. If you set the pot slightly off-center over the burner, the foam will collect to one side of the pot, making for easier and swifter straining.

Rinse Canned Beans

Canned beans often have a gooey residue at the bottom that you probably don’t want in your recipes. Don’t worry – the goo is a harmless salt-and-starch mixture, and you can easily wash it away. Simply shake the beans in a strainer under cool running water for a few seconds.

Keep Your Cool

A well-chilled salad on a hot summer day is not only more delicious, it is safe. Pack salads in an insulated container surrounded by sealable bags of ice or frozen water bottles. Empty the bags and take them home to reuse.