Menu Close

The Breakfast Challenge – Potato Salad with Two Minute Mayonnaise

potato salad with two minute mayonnaise

You can’t really call this a proper, by the rules, Breakfast Cereal Challenge recipe. By the rules, breakfast should be low GI – food with “slow burn” carbohydrates to keep you feeling clear headed and energetic through to lunch time.  And potatoes are high GI (though cooking them skin on and mixing them with eggs helps lower it a bit).  But I’ve started harvesting the potatoes and they are such a treat, and breakfast is such a good meal for them to star in.

I grew kipfers this season – an elongated waxy variety specially good for potato salads and for baking.  The cooler nights so far have made it a good season for them. I don’t grow a huge amount of potatoes, and we treat them as a seasonal vegetable rather than a storage staple. I don’t really need the calories of potatoes every meal, and fresh in-season spuds spoil you for the supermarket kind. The treatment used to stop them sprouting worries me too. So when they are in season, resistance is futile!

The Recipe:

This works best with a waxy potato variety like kipfer or bintje, desiree, pink fir apple, or red pontiac. It’s also a really good way to use the little marble sized potatoes that you always get along with the full size ones.

If you cut your potatoes into large marble size, they take the same time to cook as a medium sized egg hard boiled, so you can cook both in the same pot.

  • Put a good handful of chopped potato per person and 1 or 2 eggs per person in a pot of cold water. Bring to the boil and simmer for 5 minutes, till the potatoes are just “al dente” and the eggs are hard boiled.
  • Meanwhile, finely chop a good handful of herbs per person. I like parsley, dill, mint, and aragula or rocket, along with some spring onion greens or chives.  If you still have celery going well, a bit of celery adds a nice crunch. My celery is usually all gone to seed by this time of year, but the unusually cool year means I still have some.
  • Drain the potatoes, peel and chop the eggs, and toss the lot together with a couple of teaspoons of home-made whole egg mayonnaise per person. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and serve.

Two Minute Mayonnaise

making mayonnaise with a stick blender

whole egg mayonnaiseThe super easy, super fast, super reliable way to make mayonnaise is with a stick blender. No dribbling the oil in, no splitting, no whisking.

There are two bits of chemistry that make it work.

  1. You put all the ingredients in the blender jug and they separate.  The oil floats on top of everything else.
  2. You put the stick blender in the bottom and start it, and it creates a little vortex, dragging the oil down at the perfect rate to emulsify it.

Works every time. This is the ingredients before blending. And this is them after.

It’s so easy, I like to make small amounts of fresh mayonnaise when I need it, rather than a big batch to keep in the fridge. It uses raw egg, so it’s good to make with eggs from chooks you know are well fed and healthy.

My version:

Put in the blender jug:

  • 1 whole egg
  • 1 scant teaspoon of seeded mustard
  • 1 clove of garlic
  • juice of ¼ lemon
  • good pinch of salt
  • 6 capers (optional)
  • 100 ml of grape seed oil (or canola or sunflower oil – not olive oil – it makes bitter mayo).

Put the stick blender in and let it settle for a minute to separate into layers. Then, with the blender fully submerged, hit the button. Once it has started to emulsify, you can move the blender around to make sure the garlic and capers are blended in.

Posted in Breakfast, Recipes, Vegetable Recipes

Related Posts

14 Comments

  1. brenda

    OK, so don’t laugh. I only had olive, sesame, and walnut oil so went with walnut. May have been a little shy on a few other things too, and at the moment, don’t own a blender. Still, I ended up with a yummy sauce that I poured over a baked potato. Thanks for dinner. It was my first attempt at
    mayo, and I’ll definitely keep working on this as I upgrade equipment and ingredients.

    brenda from arkansas

  2. Linda Woodrow

    You are brave Brenda! A stick blender is the implement. Making mayo without one is s knack – not really difficult, just tricky – hard to explain and easy to stuff up. With a stick blender though, it’s impossible to stuff up. Glad it tasted good though!

  3. cecilia gunther

    It is the mayo I love here, but I do not have a stick blender, would a little food processor work?, i will experiment. i love potato salad.. your garden sounds like it is doing really well.. c

  4. Linda

    Hi Cecilia, it’s the mayo I love too. But making it in a food processor is a different process. You have to go with the old method of adding the oil very slowly at first, drop by drop, till it starts emulsifying, then in a slow stream. The stick blender really does make it so easy.

  5. Pingback:Kangaroo Burgers

  6. Pingback:Roast Winter Root Veg With Caper Mayo

  7. Pingback:Leafy Planting Days in Mid Spring

  8. Julie

    Hi Linda. Just tried your stick blender recipe. I made sure the oil was on top before blending but it turned out too thin & watery. What have I done wrong??

  9. Linda

    possibly too little oil Julie? It’s counterintuitive, but more oil makes it thicker. I know when I’ve tried to make it scimping on the oil it turns out too thin. I’d let it settle, add some more oil, and blend some more.

  10. Pingback:Celeriac Laktes

  11. Pingback:Cabbage Love

  12. Pingback:Very Inauthentic Okonomiyaki

  13. Pingback:Green Goddess Sauce - The Witches Kitchen

  14. Adair Uden

    Hello Linda. I wondered why my mayonnaise tasted bitter, I had to add sugar which is not so good. I thought good olive oil was the best to use, but no. Your recipe is so much tastier Thank you. Adair from NZ

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.