Reproducing classic Hawaiian Mac Salad - Round 1

If you are reading this, you have already read my tale of L & L Hawaiian Barbecue. As any local (to Hawaii) knows, one of the keys to a proper plate lunch is a scoop of proper macaroni salad.

To me, the proper mac salad does not contain potato, cheese, tuna, peas, or any sort of extra food other than some occasional grated carrot purely for color. This is not to say those variants are bad; they just have no place in a plate lunch.

I decided to take a stab at recreating the classic Hawaiian mac salad. I hit up my favorite food site, recipezaar.com, but all the recipes there contained adulterations such as pineapple and potato chunks. I expanded my search to Google, but still found it difficult to find a pure local style mac salad.

I did notice of all the mac salad recipes, one thing was consistent. They all used mayo or Miracle Whip as the base. Most cut down the mayo with milk, going with a ratio of 1 cup mayo to 1/4 cup milk. While I had heard that the true mac salad uses sour cream, none of the recipes I saw mentioned it.

What you see here is a semi-scientific crack at reproducing the mac salad. I went with a simple recipe as follows:

Experimental Local Style Mac Salad

• 2 cups dry elbow macaroni
• 1 cup mayonnaise ("M") or Miracle Whip ("MW")>
• optional glob of sour cream ("S")
• 1/4 cup milk (Next time I'll do 1/3 cup or more!)
• Salt (a reasonable amount)
• Pepper (enough to give it the right look)
• finely grated carrot for color

Directions

• Mix up everything but the macaroni. Or maybe you want to wait on the salt and pepper and add them in afterwards. Whatever.
• Boil up some elbow macaroni for 15 minutes. (My mistake was to boil the macaroni for 10 minutes, as one does for mac-n-cheese. Big mistake. Next time I'll boil it for 15 minutes.)
• Drain the mac into a colander. Rinse the macaroni with cold water to stop it from cooking further.
• Pour the drained macaroni into a pot and stir in the base. Toss in the grated carrot and mix it up. If you wimped out and waited til' now to add in the salt and pepper, do so now. Cover the salad up and stick it in the fridge overnight.

I created four variants of the salad base; Mayo ("M"), Mayo with sour cream ("MS"), Miracle Whip ("MW"), and Miracle whip with sour cream ("MWS"). They all had to go in the fridge overnight, and that was key. The overnight sit gives the mac time to set up and not look like a blob of hot mayo, which is rather unappealing.

Ah, the taste test! Here are the results. First off, I really undercooked the mac, so the noodles were way too chewy. This alone made it difficult to accurately gauge the taste. Next, the mayo or Miracle Whip taste was very overpowering. I will certainly crank up the amount of milk in the mixture to cut down on the overwhelming mayo taste. Okay, that being said, between my wife and I, the "MS" variant is the closest to the real thing, followed by "MWS", then "M", then "MW". It is a fine line between not enough sour cream and too much. The sour cream works mostly as a counter to the mayo, and is not intended to impart it's own distinct flavor. Getting the amount of milk and sour cream right is something I'll have to wrestle with in an future round of taste testing.