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. 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
Tubers
Nigel Deacon / Diversity website
