In this week’s episode, I’m showing you how to make a bold, no-BS potato salad that hits hard and pairs perfectly with ribs, chicken, burgers—whatever’s hot off the grill.
This isn’t your grandma’s mayo mess…
This is firehouse-tested and crew-approved.
👉 If you watched Episode 1 (Ribs That Rip), this is the side dish you need to round it out.
What’s inside:
🥔 Firehouse-style potatoes
🧅 The crunch your crew craves
🔥 A flavor bomb that’ll light up your shift meal
Make it cold. Make it bold.
Firehouse cooking starts here.
📺 Watch Episode 1 – Ribs That Rip:
📘 Grab the Chow’s On! recipe book (coming soon)
📲 Follow @NextGenFirefighter for more firehouse food, fitness, and real-talk.
#NextGenFirefighter #ChowsOn #PotatoSaladRecipe #FirehouseCooking #ShiftMeals #FirefighterFood #KitchenLeadership #FIRE4 #SaturdayEats
Ciao, come and get in. Welcome to Chowo on firehouse cooking done right for you by Brandon, NextGen firefighter. Hey, so today we’re going to make some firehouse potato salad. All right, so here’s your ingredients. Uh, I’ll put up a photo right now with a list of what you need. Um, but, uh, I like to add bacon or we firefighters like to add bacon in the firehouse to our potato salad. Uh, so you definitely want some bacon and I really love green onions in mine. A little bit of celery for the crunch. Uh, oh yeah, some relish for some for some dazzle. And uh so what we’re going to do first is we’re going to get our water boiling. So if you don’t have one of these fancy things, you go do it at your sink. So you get some water going. Get that water heated up for the potatoes and for your eggs. So, I’m going to throw in five or six just to be safe. And you can always You can always eat them on the side. Some hard-boiled eggs if you want. Let’s get our burners going. All right. Then next we want to get some bacon going. I’m going to use about this much. So I got, let’s see, one, two, three, four, five, six thick sliced bacon. All right. And you want to cut this stuff up into little small chunks and then fry them up that way. So then you can just add them to your potato salad when the salad’s all ready. All right. So slice up your bacon. I forgot to tell you guys today’s shirt. I’m going to wear different fire shirts every show uh because I love collecting shirts. So this shirt is Ghost Squad 44. now known as Heavy Rescue 44. Uh it’s on Phoenix Fire Department on the west side. I spent two and a half, three years there. It was the most fun I’ve ever had on the fire department and had a really good crew and got into a lot of adventures on squad 44. So, also got the squad 40, the ghost squad hat. Boom. Start trimming off all this junk on the celery. And then we start dicing up our celery. And we want to make this pretty small so you don’t get big huge crunchy celery pieces in your potato salad. I’m not a fan of that. I like a little bit of crunch in there, but not big huge mouthful crunches. You know what I mean? So, chop up your big chunks as best as you can. And you know, you don’t have to get perfect, but you want to be thorough. You might have a couple big chunks in there every once in a while, but hey, firehouse cooking isn’t perfect. All right, so I got a good amount of celery there. It’s good to go. Push that off to the side. And you see this? See, when you get these when you get these green onions in the store, man, sometimes they’re pretty they’re pretty lame. Look at that. And I just throw those parts off to the side. I try to keep the good parts, you know? Like, look at that. Look at that little limp dick, dude. You don’t want that. You don’t want limp dick. And then this little baby dick. Throw that off. And then usually the ends here. So all your flavors down towards this part. This is where the the good green onion flavor is through there. But you can still use all this darker green stuff. But if you look at the tips, the tips are pretty worn out, pretty pretty limpy. So, I usually cut off the ends, throw those to the side, put them in your compost bin if you’re a hippie, and then just start slicing up your green onions. Keep your fingers out of the way cuz uh firemen don’t like blood in their food, that’s for sure. So, don’t cut your finger. Dice up your green onion nice and nice and small. And I like to slow down when I get close to my fingers because I don’t want to cut my fingers. All right. Now, you can go deeper than that if you want to, but I don’t. That’s a pretty good pile of green onion right there. So, we set that off to the side. And now our produce is prepped and ready to go. So my pan over there is probably heated up at this point. So I’m going to come over here. I’m going to put my bacon in the pan. Oh yeah. Hear that sizzle? So right here with your eggs, once it starts boiling, everybody has their own theory about eggs, right? Eggs are tough. How do you get a perfect boiled egg where the shell just pops off? Hell, I don’t know. But what I do know is when the water starts boiling, I go 10 minutes, then shut it down and add some ice to the water and let them cool down for a little while and then I’ll try to peel them. And sometimes those shells come off perfectly and then sometimes I’m picking little pieces off, man. So, I don’t have the trick for that. I apologize. Maybe if one of you out in the audience has the perfect trick to boil the perfect egg where the shell just comes off, drop it in the comments and let me know. All right, so let me get a let me get a spatula here. Oh yeah, look at that spatula. That’s a big one. Now, one thing I learned early on in cooking is heat control, right? So, I had it on high to get the temperature up, but now I start turning it down cuz if you cook it too fast, it starts to burn. It gets all too crispy. All right? You don’t want bacon too crispy in your potato salad. All right? So, water started boiling. I’m going to start a 10-minute timer. All right. So, I started my 10-minute timer. That’s going to let me know when the eggs are ready. And then this is going to get close. So, then we come over here and we start peeling our potatoes. So, I’m just going to make a bunch of potato salad. This is a 5B bag. This will definitely feed up to 10 firemen, 10 hungry firemen at your station or at your house. So, as you’re peeling, don’t forget You’ve got bacon cooking over there. So, you can’t forget about your bacon. So, I’m going to peel a few and then I’m going to go check on it. Oh, man. And babe, get a shot of those those eggs. I can hear them bouncing around, boiling. All right, I smell that bacon. I’m going to go check on it. Oh yeah, that’s a nice slow cook. But look at it. It’s starting to get all cooked and crispy. So, keep those going. Go back to your potatoes. You know, the key with firehouse cooking is bouncing back and forth between what you got going on, right? There’s a lot of moving parts in the fire kitchen. A lot of moving parts. And in most kitchens, you have a bunch of people helping, which is super cool. This is where we get to know the new guys. This is where we tell stories. This is where we tell jokes. This is where we talk about calls. And I love the fire kitchen. You know, one of the big things in the fire service is mental health. And one of the great places to decompress and to talk about stuff and get it off your chest is cooking is in the fire kitchen. Chopping, dicing, slicing, talking with your buddies, reminiscing over calls, reminiscing over good times, making jokes, making fun of people. That’s always a staple in the fire department is making fun of your buddies. the banter. All right. So, I can smell the bacon still. I can hear it. I can hear that the the sizzle is slowing down a little bit. All right. She’s still going. Look at that. Yeah. Look at that bacon. Eggs are still going. This water’s boiling. Hey, if any of you guys have cool recipes or dishes, reach out to me and let me know and we can get together and cook together. That’d be fun. Or if you don’t know anything, get a hold of me and you can come over here and I’ll teach you how to cook something. That’ll be pretty badass. I got some pretty good recipes. What you guys got to do on the fire department, man, is you guys have to get in the kitchen and start learning from the older guys. That’s how I learned. Most most firemen know how to cook. And it’s funny because I’ve ran into guys who’ve got like five, six years on the job and they’ll tell you, “Man, I don’t know how to cook anything.” And that’s not acceptable. You got to know how to throw down. You got to have at least four dishes in your recipe library because when you come into a station, uh, somebody might want you to cook for that day. So, you got to have something to throw down. So, practice at home, practice on your family first and then you go take it to the fire station. But I remember my first time I cooked it was at station 20. I was a booter there. I was on probation. It was my first booter station and they asked me to cook and I cooked brz and tots and I burned half the brz and they were pissed. All right, our bacon looks good. Look at that. Come look at this bacon. So, I’m going to turn the burner off. Let it sizzle a little bit. I’m going to get a plate. I’m going to put a piece of paper towel on there to drain off the grease. Hell, maybe two. Oh yeah, she’s finishing up nice. Going to drain off that grease. Put it on your plate. Need something a little smaller. Let’s check in here. Oh, yeah. Let’s get this metal spoon. Oh, you see my dog right there? She smells She smells food. So, you know she’s going to be in here begging begging for stuff. All right. So, let your bacon sit. Check your timer. Got 3 minutes 15 seconds. We’ll peel these last two. Hey, something about potato salad, too. I had a guy at my station. He cooked he made the potato salad right before dinner. Nobody likes warm potato salad. It doesn’t taste good. you know, warm warm mayonnaise, not really my thing. So, if you’re cooking potato salad for dinner, you want to make it right around lunchtime and put it in the fridge so it has time to cool off. And if you’re making it for lunch, you better get it done by like 9:00 a.m. and get it in that fridge so it cools off for lunch. All right, so there we go. Kind of made a mess here. But that’s firehouse cooking, guys. All right. So, I’m going to wash my knife again. And then, so when you’re cooking potato salad, I like to cut them in half and then cut them in half again. So, that’s about the size that I make for potato salad. All right, that’s a good size. That’s a good bite size. Plus, you’re going to have all your other fixings and stuff in there. Plus, some of them are going to be smaller, some of them are going to be a little bigger, just depending on what part of the potato you’re cooking, what part of the potato you’re slicing, cuz look at look at this slice. See, that’s an end piece. That’s a little smaller slice. You’re going to have all different kinds of sizes in there. So, cut in half. Then cut in half and dice. All right, let me check my timer. We got 10 seconds left. All right, so I turn this off. We’ll set to the side and let it rest for a minute. So, like I said, in the kitchen, you should have some some of your buddies helping you do all this. But sometimes at my station at 400 p.m., we do a skills course. So, if it’s my day to cook, I’ll head in early and I’ll start cooking while the guys finish their skills course. So sometimes I’m in there all by myself doing it. So it’s good to know how to do it just yourself for sure. So last August, August of 2024, we had a leak in our kitchen wall over here behind our sink. And we didn’t know about it because it didn’t present itself for who knows how long. But when it did present itself, it had migrated all the way over to our front room over there. And we had to rip up the floor. We had to rip out the cabinets. And then me and my wife and my dad put in all the these new cabinets. You see, we put them in ourselves. Never done that before, but we figured it out. It was a lot of work. And now we’re um we got to redo the floor. Lot of work in a kitchen remodel. So, if you’re wondering why is Brandon’s floor concrete, well, that’s because I had a kitchen leak. So, our potatoes are chopped finally. It took a while. This you need a probationary guy come help you cook. All right. You come over here. Want to wash all these off. Wash them off the best you can. All right. Shake out that excess water. Then come over here and dump them into your water. Be careful not to burn yourself. Okay. So, these are going to boil for a while. And what you do, where’s my where’s my spoon? So, as you check these, so let them let them get boiling first. See that? It’s not boiling yet, but once they start boiling, let them boil for like 5 to 10 minutes. Then you come over here, you check the firmness. Okay. Now, for like mashed potatoes and stuff, which I’ll teach some other day, you want it to be able to be really soft. But for potato salad, you want a little bit of firmness in the middle there. See that? That’s pretty firm. It’s not even going in. So, we’ll check back in a few minutes and I’ll show you how to make them perfect for potato salad. Oh, in the meantime, hold on. Let’s do this. Let’s come over to the freezer. So, I throw some ice in there, cool down that water, get some ice in there and cool down that water and let them let them sit for a little while. All right, we’ll take a break and I’ll show you what’s going to be done here in a few minutes. All right. So, they’ve been boiling for between five and 10 minutes. If you pull these up and you put your knife, get a knife and put it in there, they’re soft, right? So, let’s turn it off. Now, when you eat potato salad, just think about what kind of firmness you like to eat in your potato salad, right? Nobody wants a crunch in their potato salad, but they do want firm. They don’t want mushy mashed potatoes, right? So, like I said, grab a spoon, grab a knife, find a piece, and stick it in the middle. It’s nice firm. It’s firm. It’s not hard. All right, so we’re going to drain them out. So, drain out your potatoes. Let them drain out. Whoa, my glasses are foggy. And then what we’re going to do, we’re going to put them in a bowl and we’re going to set it in the fridge. And we’re going to let that fridge cool them off. And it might take about an hour to cool them off, maybe even more. You can even put them in the freezer if you want to get it faster. All right, so pour them into a bowl. and then put them in the fridge. All right. So, now we’re going to peel our eggs. Just tap them on the counter and start peeling them. Now, like I said, sometimes they come off beautifully and sometimes they they’re a pain in the ass. That one was easy. Tap on the counter. For some reason, it makes it easier to run it under water. Oh, look at that. Beautiful. Boom. Look at that. Dunzo. All right. So, you don’t want soggy eggs, soggy, watery eggs. So, kind of dry them off a little bit. Now, the size that you cut this into is just a personal preference. It’s all about what do you like your potato salad to be. So, I just always think of like bite-sized pieces. So, chop it up to your desired size. Everybody’s different. I like mine a little smaller. I don’t like big bites of egg in my potato salad. All right. So, there it is for me. Just like that. So, you set this off to the side and just still waiting on the potatoes to cool down. All right, come back in a few minutes. So, just a quick side note, I actually put them in the freezer and it only took about an hour for them to cool down. They got real nice and cool. Perfect, man. All right. So, if you’re in a rush at the station, just put them in the freezer and they’ll cool off real quick. I also so I’m cooking at home and I’m cooking this for my making this for my family. So I had too much potatoes for what little bacon and celery I have. So I took some out. Going to make them hash browns tomorrow. So we have our potatoes. We have all our ingredients here. First thing you want to do is you want to add your mayo. Now, mayo, you’re just adding it to taste and to look, right? So, I don’t have a an exact measurement for you. So, we kind of just add as we go. Most firehouse cooking is by eyeball. All right? We don’t use we don’t use measuring cups and and tablespoons and all that jazz. We just throw and go, man. That’s how we do it. So So see, to me, that’s starting to look like a pretty good potato salad mix right there, right? But it’s all it’s up to you and what you what your taste is. So now I’m going to add some mustard. And remember with everything you cook with, you can add two, but you can’t take away. So once you put this mustard in, you can’t take it out. So don’t put too much in. So just go sparingly at with it at first, right? You don’t want potato salad to be too mustardy. Now, see, lookwise, looks wise. Lookwise, looks wise. Hell, I don’t know. It looks pretty good, right? I like that color. So, I’m going to add my bacon to it now. And I love lots of bacon, so I’m adding it all. I’m gonna add some egg. Right. And you just got to go, you got to go with how it looks. That looks pretty good. That looks like a good portion. We’ll mix it up. We’ll see what it looks like. I can already start to tell it needs more mayo. See how dry it is? You start adding stuff to it, soaks up all that moisture. So, I’m going to add some celery. Add just a little bit more. All right, that looks pretty good. I’m going to add some green onion cuz I love green onion. All right, see what that looks like. That looks like a good portion. And I’ll say it again, most firemen, none that I’ve ever met, use cups and tablespoons. They just throw together, man. They make it work. Now, of course, there are some some some recipes like the 231 sauce that I’ll teach someday that is exact measurements. And if you’re baking, definitely have to use exact measurements. But I’m not a baker. I’m a cooker. I’m a griller. All right. So, I added some more mayo. I’m going to mix it up. See, that looks pretty good to me. That looks pretty good. Now, I’m going to add some relish. Add just another spoonful. I’m just going off looks. That looks pretty good to me. Mix it up. And you got to taste it. Of course, I haven’t put in salt or pepper or anything yet. I’m just tasting to see how the concoction mix works. That’s good. I like that. Now, we’re going to add some salt. And with salt, definitely don’t want to add too much. I’m going add some pepper. I’m not a big pepper guy, so I go sparingly on the pepper. Pap, too. Okay. My wife is saying papa tastes good in potato salad. We’ll try it. Okay. That’s good. Hell yeah. Just a little bit more salt. Just a little bit. You got to remember that that bacon’s salty, too. So that bacon adds a saltiness to it as well. And then based upon my lovely camera woman, I’m going to throw some paprika in there. We don’t have any. Oh Jesus. So my wife tells me to add an ingredient that we don’t have. So, what you also want to do too is you want to have somebody else taste it so they can give you some feedback too. Then you ask them doesn’t need anything. More mayo. All right. Mama’s saying more mayo. I’m down for mayo because I love mayo. All right, I added some more mayo. Now we’re going to mix it up. All right, let’s throw in some more egg, too, since we added some more mayo. That’s good. Let’s add some more onion. Wish I had more bacon. I wish I would have cooked more bacon. Oh, I love bacon. Okay, since we added more mayo, need a little bit more salt. Now, a little more pepper. Then you you airplane it to your wife who’s filming you. She says it’s good. All right. So there’s potato salad. So, cover it with some some plastic wrap, put it on the table, wait for the ribs or the steaks or whatever you’re serving it with to come off the grill. Get on the horn and say, “Chows on.” Hope you enjoy, guys. Peace.