Salad for a Barbecue (Brazil)

I have managed to avoid potato salad for most of my life. I'm not really sure why I have felt the need to do this, I suppose simply because the idea of mayonnaise with cold potato doesn't much appeal to me. So the idea of making this recipe didn't fill me with joy. 

This recipe did peak our interests though because in the recipe book it reads Salad for a barbecue (AKA mayonnaise).  We all love mayonnaise and this recipe teaches you to make it.  

What neither of us realised is just how easy it is to make mayonnaise so when we read the recipe we got very excited to try it. 

To those of you who haven't made it before, it's basically just egg yolks (surprise right? we thought it would have been whites but no!) and oil.  

This specific recipe also adds Dijon mustard - so I suppose it's more of a Dijonnaise- and lemon juice. 

All of the ingredients other than the oil get mixed together in the food mixer and then you start to gradually add the oil until you get a creamy, smooth consistency.  You are supposed to use a blend of extra virgin olive oil and light olive oil but all we had was extra virgin.  Although this did work to make the mayonnaise, it did give it a rather strong oily flavour which we think overpowered the mayonnaise a little.  

For the salad itself, you boil potatoes, carrots and peas together and let them cool before mixing them with some spring onions, parsley and as much of the mayonnaise as you like. At this stage, although it was simple to make, we did worry that we'd chopped the potato too small but really the only thing you need to do is to try and get even sizing.  You then cook them until they're 5 or so minutes off being cooked and then throw the carrots and peas into the water for the last five minutes.  Allegra also says that half the carrots should be sliced and the other half cubed. We didn't fully understand this until we tasted the end result but it added a great crunch to the chunky carrots and they worked perfectly with the other ingredients. 


Since the title does say it's for a barbecue, we decided to serve it with a barbecue.  We made chicken kebabs and mushroom cream sauce and the mix of all three together was superb.  It was such an incredibly simple recipe and you get a jar of mayonnaise out of it - we may have to make our own more often.  We would use the blended oils next time and would fine tune the recipe to our tastes of course but for the cost of two eggs and some oil you get a rather large amount of mayo so I'd say it's definitely worth it.