For me, the best part of early winter is the fresh, from the ground, sweet potato. I eat a lot of them between November and February.
I like to bake them. prick the potato several places with a fork, rub with butter and put on a baking pan. 350 degrees, 1 hour 15 minutes. That’s usually about perfect for medium size ones.
The next day, I take the left over ones from the fridge. peel, dice, and cook in a pan with butter. yum!!!
Sweet Potato Casserole is good too. Candied Sweet Potatoes, Sweet Potato pie. Let’s see what else? :dubious: I bet someone knows a way I forgot.
If you want to use fresh sweet potatoes for pie or casserole. How do you do that? It’s been years since I did it without the canned stuff.
Do you just slice & boil them until tender? Cool and then make the casserole or pie? I can’t remember the last time anyone in my family did this with anything but canned.
I got an awesome sweet potato recipe from Cook’s Illustrated magazine a couple of years ago and still make it all the time. Basically you cut the sweet potatoes into rounds. You toss them with a little olive oil and salt. Line a baking sheet with foil, and place the rounds onto the foil in a single layer. Then cover the pan tightly with foil.
It goes into a cold oven (that part is important, for some arcane cooking reason I can’t remember at the moment) at… I think 400 degrees? For half an hour. Then you remove the foil, bake for another half hour or so, then flip and give them another 20ish minutes. They come out browned and tasty and zomg, so good. I can try to locate the actual recipe tomorrow to check the temperature and timing details if anyone is interested.
Baked, gutted, butter, salt, pepper. I really dislike candied sweet potatoes, particularly with marshmallows. Who the hell ever thought up that concoction? I also like to cut them into wedges, toss in olive oil and seasoned salt, and roast them.
My mom makes incredible sweet potato fritters, with a recipe that I have intentionally not learned, because my waistline already bears watching. Essentially, though, she uses leftover baked sweet potatoes, mashed, plus some flour, brown sugar, egg, and cinnamon to make a thick batter. Drop by spoonsful into hot deep fryer. Sift powdered sugar onto hot fritters. Eat. Watch thighs grow. Seriously good.
I too adore sweet potatoes, particularly in their simplest form: baked, and served with or without butter. No real need to gild the proverbial lily.
Oh, and every recipe I see suggests boiling potatoes before using in a casserole. Personally, I like to bake them, since it seems to add depth to the flavor. I usually use a potato ricer instead of mashing, since that seems to remove those long stringy fibers.
I like to bake them, split them, and put some butter, cinnamon, and a LITTLE BIT of brown sugar in them. I don’t like them candied, that’s too sweet for me (and I have a big sweet tooth). My husband and I sometimes split a small sweet potato, and he likes his half with butter and salt and pepper.
Don’t like them as a vegetable by themselves they are just too sweet for my tooth. However. I do think they make a good bulking agent for a curry (along with pumpkin and other squashes) as such dishes need the sweetness and the nutty qualities work well with the sharper and more fragrant ingredients.
Peel, chop into small cubes, toss with olive oil, rosemary, salt and pepper, and then roast in the oven till they’re a little brown on the outside and you can poke a fork through them.
Love them baked! One of the steakhouses I eat at sometimes has this cinnamon-infused butter that they serve with their store-baked biscuits. They put the same butter on their sweet potatoes. Mmmmm. The offer the option of marshmallows and brown sugar on top of the potato, but I don’t find it necessary.
