Sweet Potatoes: the Topic

[Pam R]

I like to make sweet potato latkes - shredded sweet potato, red potato (in a 2:1 ratio), onions, salt, pepper, egg, flour/matzoh meal. Fried crisp on both sides. I've also made a variation with grated apples and cinnamon in it.

Also like to make soup - and a couple of times a week I cube it up, toss with olive oil, kosher salt and black pepper and roast until caramelized.

Love them.

[Brithack]

I often make a sweet potato soup with Thai flavours - quite a few - lemon grass, kaffir lime leaves, chilli, onion, garlic, ginger/galangal, coriander... that's really completely delicious (if I say so myself). The Thai flavours stop the sweetness being cloying. Now I can hardly wait for the weather to get cooler so I can cook a pot.

[cakewalk]

Thanks for that link re: sweet potatoes and yams. And for the recipe, which looks wonderful. I noticed on the other thread in the Southern forum that many of the recipes combined sweet potatoes with lime juice. It's a combination I never would have thought of, but now I have to try it. I usually just bake sweet potatoes and eat with salt and pepper, I rarely even put butter on it because it has such a distinctive and wonderful flavor of its own.

I remember a while ago there was a recipe for sweet potato/parsnip latkes. I was too lazy to make latkes so I made a kugel out of it, and it really was wonderful. Great combination of flavors.

[little ms foodie]

Just in time for turkey day....

I like to cube and roast sweet potatoes then toss them with onion confit and sage butter

[prasantrin]

OK y'all. I'm getting desperate. I want some sweet potatoes/yams--the orange kind that is often eaten with Thanksgiving dinner in the US or Canada. In Japan, it's pretty much impossible to find them raw and the Japanese sweet potatoes just don't do it for me. I can order an entire case of Princella Cut Sweet Potatoes (12 cans of 40oz, not in syrup) or an entire case of Springfield Cut Yams (12 cans of 20oz, not in syrup).

Here's the problem--I don't want to end up with a whole case of canned yams if they're not very good. I've never had canned yams, though, so I don't even know what to expect from them. I would most likely use them for mashed sweet potatoes or roasted sweet potatoes (just with a bit of butter, salt, and pepper). I might sometimes load them with butter and sprinkle them with brown sugar and pecans or walnuts and bake them like that. But that's pretty much the extent of my sweet potato repertoire.

So for those of you with experience with canned sweet potatoes, not in syrup, can a sweet potato lover who's never had them love them, too? Or am I doomed to never eat another orange sweet potato for as long as I live in Japan?

[Adam Balic]

I am still trying, after many years of making numerous attempts, to duplicate the candied sweet potatos (or squash) that used to be sold by the street vendors in Mexico City.  They carried or wheeled around a little metal brazier, (looked like they were made from a metal 5 gallon can) and would spear (with a round wooden stick that looked like a piece of 1/4 inch dowel with one sharp end) a slab of partially cooked sweet potato from a pot that held a sweet syrup (might have been agave syrup), and put it onto the pierced top of the brazier, turn it a few times until all sides were bubbling and beginning to get black and brown on the edges, then twist a bit of newspaper around the stick and hand it over. 

I can remember trying to wait until it had cooled enough so one wouldn't scorch lips and tongue because it seemed to be about the temperature of molton lava. 

One did not have to worry about getting "tourista" from this because no germ could have survived in either the hot syrup or on the surface of the brazier. 

The closest I have come is parboiling until they were just barely tender, slicing into 1 inch thick rounds, soaking in hot syrup, then cooking over the charcoal grill on one of the pierced pans made for cooking small items on the grill. 

The problem is that I am not sure that I am using the same kind of sweet potato or if there is a step in the pre-cooking process that I am missing. 

The last time I was in Mexico City we couldn't find a single one of these particular street vendors, although every other type was there in abundance, although it may have been the wrong time of the year for them. 

If anyone has any idea about this, I would certainly appreciate it.

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Andie -

here are some candied sweet potatoes I made for the mexican day of the dead, as a substitute for candied pumpkin.

I used a basic technique for making candied veg or fruit. Chop up the sweet potato and mix with an equal amount sugar. Leave overnight for the juices to be drawn out. Heat very gently until the sugar is disolved, then increase heat until boiling, boil for 5 minute, then allow to cool overnight. The next day take the sweet potatoes out of the syrup, bring the syrup to boil and boil for five minutes. Repeat this process for five days. The sweet potato chunks can now be removed an allowed to dry or rolled in more sugar to coat, at which point that can be briefly grilled to glaze and brown. This is a basic English preparation for making candied roots (sweet potatoes were thought to be deeply sexual itemes when prepared in this manner when first introduced). In Mexicon the candied pumpkin would be soak overnight in lye water to set them an produce a more toothsome texture, so you could try this also.

[Adam Balic]

I haven't seen much discussion on the types of sweet potato around, which is surprising as there is some much variation in colour, form and especially flavour.

Here are two similar types that are both of the purple skinned, pale fleshed type, yes, so they must taste the same. Wrong, wrong, wrong. The one on the right is by far the better type. It tastes of butter and sweet chestnuts with a non-mealy texture. It comes from New Zealand and is known as a "kumara", it can be identified by the violet colour of the skin (rather then dull purple), which you can see when you scratch it with a fingernail. For those in the UK, it can from Sainsburys of all places.

[Khadija]

I want to make sweet potato chips with some yams I have on hand.

A few months ago, I made chips with purple sweet potatoes. They were good, but not great, and I had some problems. They took a very long time to cook to the point of crispness, and by that time, many (most) burned.

I don't have a deep fryer. I usually fry in a wok on my crappy electric stove. I do have a mandoline (Benriner).

I am tempted to try baking the chips (I'm not really in the mood to deep fry), but I am worried that they won't crisp up or will wind up too dry.

Thoughts?

[maggiethecat]

I know that November is the apotheosis of the sweet potato.Enrobed in butter and brown sugar, marshmallows optional -- though not for Julia Child -- she loved them. Finer cooks than I make sweet potato fritters, sweet potato fries, sweet potato gnocchi. In fact, I've made them myself. And I don't like them.

Somehow, the sugar content in the sweet potato, when fried, makes for a greasy exterior and a tight, over caramelized interior.If the dish is glistening with sugar and butter (and maybe marshmallows) it's just too sweet.

I'm a sweet potato Calvinist. I love them baked (or even microwaved) with lots of butter. I made a sweet potato risotto once (Michel Richard? Ming Tsai?) that killed. I like them in a savory soup. I like them plain.

No sweeteners, no fat. Are there any other sweet potato purists like me out there?

[annachan]

My favorite way is just roast them in the oven in their skin. Cut it open like a baked potato and dig and spoon in it. The make them a little more fancy, I scoop out the inside when they're done roasting. Mash with just a little cream and a dash of salt. It's simple and delicious.

[Chris Amirault]

What can you say? When you're right, you're right. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man certainly would agree....

[JAZ]

I like them plain -- my oldest sister used to bake them, and I got into the habit of eating them that way back in my grad school days. I don't like them sweetened; maple syrup or sugar added to sweet potatoes makes me think they can't decide whether to be a vegetable or a dessert. And I'm not a fan of sweet potato fries -- I think they just have too much moisture and sugar to make that work well. But all that being said, there are a couple of ways I "dress up" sweet potatoes that I think work really well.

One is a dish that we've used for Valentine's Day cooking classes -- steamed sweet potatoes riced and mixed with cream and butter, topped with steamed red beets that have been cut into brunoise and tossed in a saute pan with some butter. The colors are gorgeous and the flavors are great together.

Somewhere I came across a recipe for roasted sweet potato chunks and onions that were tossed with grated parm and minced fresh rosemary, and I've stolen the flavor combination for sweet potato croquettes with those ingredients. They don't suck.

[Chris Hennes]

Y'all crazy. Sweet potatoes and bacon are a match made in heaven. Twice-baked sweet potatoes with ludicrous amounts of bacon and some butter and black pepper. Nice.

[caroled]

Straight up is the way to go for me.

Scrub the skins well, and dry. Prick the skin in a couple of places and microwave just til hot to get them going and then toss in a hot oven til creamy tender and the skins crackle. Serve with a sprinkling of salt. That is all.

[maggiethecat]

Y'all crazy. Sweet potatoes and bacon are a match made in heaven. Twice-baked sweet potatoes with ludicrous amounts of bacon and some butter and black pepper. Nice.

Well, you're not zactly refuting my thesis here, Chris. You're promoting a savory sweet potato. With bacom!

[heidih]

I also favor them unadorned; microwaved or baked. I have never cubed and roasted with seasonings before. That sounds interesting. A few years ago baking them in thin slices with cream and pureed chipotles en adobo was all the rage and I enjoyed the version I tasted at a gathering. There is a similar recipe floating around in various forms where they are just mashed with the chipotle, but since I am not a mashed potato fan (calm down) I also do not like these sweet guys mashed.

[KitchenMom]

I also prefer them plain, or in a more savory preparation. I actually love a baked sweet potato mashed with a teaspoon of olive oil (instead of butter). I get these lovely yellow sweet potatos from a local farm that are so good plain, but also delicious with a little spice added - a sprinkle of smoked paprika or chipotle powder is pretty terrific.

[C. sapidus]

For Thanksgiving, I inherited the job of making Bourbon sweet potatoes with orange sauce. Lotsa butter, lotsa booze, plenty good. This year, I suggested making something different.

My mother gasped. Audibly.

I’m a big fan of plain sweet potatoes, baked until liquid exudes and eaten plain, or perhaps topped with a little butter if I am feeling extravagant. I will say that smoked sweet potatoes with orange-pecan butter is mighty fine, and fills in otherwise wasted space on the Weber Bullet when we are smoking a pork butt or ribs.

[maggiethecat]

Chipotles! You ladies are genius. I can totally understand the beauty of that flavor pairing.

[Lilija]

Over the summer, I took to baking them, finishing on the smoker, for the last 20 minutes of whatever I was making, then fluff the insides with a ton of butter, and sprinkle it with barbecue rub. Which was usually salt, pepper, ground dried chilies, and a bit of brown sugar. Now, I keep a jar of the rub, just to eat with sweet potatoes.

[JTravel]

Chinese friends had told us that grilled/roasted? sweet potatoes were a favorite treat in China. They would send their daughter out with a few coins and she could buy one for an after school snack.

Then emerging from the Hong Kong subway on our trip we smelled something wonderful. There was a charcoal grill set up on the sidewalk and people were eating hot and blackened sweet potatoes. Don't know if there were condiments, I'm guessing not.

[andiesenji]

Like most folks who were born and raised in the south I do love sweet 'taters in all their various guises.

I usually bake them in their skins and just add some butter.

My grandpa liked them sliced thin and layered in a casserole with oranges and pecans, sweetened with maple sugar.

I prepare them in a similar fashion but with much less sugar, adjusted to my diabetes.

The first time I visited Mexico city, I was thrilled to find grilled, candied sweet potatoes sold on the street by vendors with little braziers. They topped them with brown sugar and a squeeze of lime juice and I thought nothing could ever top that.

I like them deep fried but I shred them finely with a rotating cutter and let them dry for a while before frying them. They cook in about 30 seconds.

About the only way I don't care for them is mashed and topped with marshmallows.

Adding bacon sounds like a winner to me. I certainly like them with pork chops.

Edited November 23, 2010 by andiesenji (log)

[maggiethecat]

The first time I visited Mexico city, I was thrilled to find grilled, candied sweet potatoes sold on the street by vendors with little braziers. They topped them with brown sugar and a squeeze of lime juice and I thought nothing could ever top that.

s.

Ok, Andie, that's the nose of the camel poking into the tent, sweet potato wise. I wonder if I'd have like them better sans brown sugar?

[Big Mike]

My wife's family makes this dish called tsimis, it's atrocious. Goo and brown sugar and marshmallows on top, blech.

I like 'em cut into wedges, tossed with olive oil and a little smoked paprika and roasted in a hot oven. I'm making a sweet potato and confit onion tart for Thanksgiving, I'll be the only one who eats it I'm sure.

[Lora]

I always have a stash of cold roasted sweet potatoes on hand. I eat them straight out of the fridge, no salt. My daughter consumes hers pureed into a smoothie with banana, cinnamon, and orange juice.

But - for Thanksgiving, our tradition is cubes roasted in bacon fat. This is a tradition now because I am the cook, and I aggressively veto any attempts to add sugary sweet potatoes to the menu.