What happened to my pie?

Cafe Society
1

I was making a sweet potato pie, following this recipe:

Alton Brown’s Sweet Potato Pie

If you don’t want to bother with the link, it goes like this: Cube some sweet potatoes and steam them. Mash them, then mix in plain yogurt, brown sugar, spices, and eggs; pour into a pie shell, bake, top with pecans and maple syrup. Sounds easy and good, yes?

I should mention that I’d never really messed with sweet potatoes from scratch before. The SPs I got from my grocery store were, when peeled, not a jolly orange color but had white flesh. After they were cooked, they had gone a faint green-gray hue. “Yuck,” I said, but pressed on with the recipe, adding the yogurt, sugar, and spices. Just before I added the eggs, I tasted the mixture.

Blech! It was not very sweet at all, and it had an unpleasantly mealy texture. No way was I going to serve someone a pie that tasted like that (not to mention the ugly grayish rotten-potato hue). I threw the whole revolting mess away and ran to the store for some canned pumpkin.

What did I do wrong? And does anyone have recipes/tips for good sweet potato pie?

2

That recipe is pretty much what goes into pumpkin pie, except for the yogurt.

I wonder if you bought yams instead of sweet potatoes. I’ve never cooked yams, but I read somewhere some varieties are an off-white color under the peel.

Good idea not to serve it. If it didn’t taste good before you baked it, it wouldn’t taste good after.

3

Hmmm, my guess is you got something other than sweet potatos. Maybe they were mismarked at the store?

Sweet potatoes, when raw, are often a bit paler than when cooked. But when cooked they do get that lovely orange color - the same as the canned ones.

So that’s my guess. Blame the taters.