Potatoes - Salad Blue
SALAD BLUE
Flower blue with yellow centre; very tall, thick haulms. Often sets seed. Prone to blight.
Yield low; around 1lb. Skin blue, flesh blue, with the colour largely retained on cooking.
Midway between floury and waxy in texture. Good boiled and used as salad potato; can be mashed
but its main appeal is the unusual colour. Good fried in oil. A great variety when entertaining; always a conversation piece.
Main hazard of storage is
blight. If affected tubers are removed promptly the variety stores well and gets more
floury after Christmas.
If seedlings of self-pollinated SALAD BLUE are grown, the tubers
produced have a range of colours from very dark blue to pale purple to white (see picture below); the flesh
may be dark blue, purple, pale purple, pale yellow or white; the colour of the flowers
is roughly related to the tuber colour, with the darkest being royal blue. White tubers
produce a very unusual flower: white and green with a yellow centre. The tubers are
generally similar to ordinary SALAD BLUE in texture and flavour but the darkest tubers
appear to have higher dry matter, a firmer texture and to be more suitable for frying.
Pictures (click on small images for detail):
Flowers
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Tubers
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Blue Salad Seedlings
Cooked tubers
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Nigel Deacon / Diversity website
