After decades of not liking sweet potatoes my tastes changed and I suddenly started eating them about three years ago. Mostly, I roast them. I’ve been looking for more ways to cook them and have found, over and over, recipes adding sugar (or honey, or other sweetener) to these.
Why?
I mean, they’re sweet potatoes. They are already naturally sweet.
Maybe that’s why I didn’t care for them for so long - adding more sweet just makes them cloying to my taste.
Is it just that American culture has so conditioned people to eat massive amounts of sugar that many can no longer taste the natural sweetness of sweet potatoes? And my inability to eat most processed foods has insulated my own taste buds?
For a lot of recipes I just don’t add all that sugar and it comes out find to my taste. So in that sense this isn’t a problem. I was just wondering how the custom started of adding additional sugar to something already sweet.
I never understood the sweet potato casserole with marshmallow on top. Talk about overload!! Maybe those who came up with such recipes just didn’t like sweet potatoes in the first place?
I agree with you. I’ll maybe add a little butter and cinnamon, or just butter, but beyond that, it’s just too much. Well, except for the recipe that has a brown sugar and pecan topping that gets crunchy when baked - yeah, more like dessert than a side dish.
My maternal grandmother used to boil them, peel them, slice them into hockey-puck size, then fry them in butter till almost black on the outside. My sibs love them that way, but I don’t get it.
I agree with you here. I hated them, since my only experience was candied sweet potatoes. Then I was served roster ones and discovered they tasted perfectly fine.
I either bake or convection roast them. No added sugar, butter, cinnamon, etc. I’ll also air fry them after cutting them into either shoestring or steak fry thickness, and serve with Heinz ketchup/catsup.
I feel the same way about salt. I don’t use much of it and I often feel that other people are making food too salty because they’re become desensitized to it. I’ve seen people add salt to a dish that already contains salty ingredients like bacon, ham, or cheese.
I think it’s about leaning into the sweetness and going full dessert style. My mom used to sprinkle sugar on strawberries, which I think are plenty sweet enough on their own.
Somebody serves me sweetened sweet potatoes, I will eat them. But if I’m making them on my own, I’ll either mix them with normal potatoes for mashing, or make oven fries with a chili-mayo sauce.
If both normal fries and sweet potato fries are offered, I will choose the sweet potato ones, especially with pulled pork. Last week I got a roasted sweet potato with a herbed cottage cheese topping. Yum!
My WAG is that it’s the holiday thing. At my house, growing up, sweet potatoes appeared at Thanksgiving and Christmas. That’s all. And when you think about those meals, there’s a variety of tastes—cranberry sauce, stuffing, turkey, bread rolls, etc. So as one singer in a choir, it’s fine. But sit down with a whole big bowl of it? Not me.
Like OP I have come to appreciate them more as I’ve grown older. Also like OP I don’t think they need extra sugar. We don’t process them like OP; rather, there are lots of items in the frozen section of the supermarket, such as these.
We want crispy, crunchy, and there are options. Another difference: Mrs. L found some low sugar variety of ketchup. I went to Contadina pizza sauce, which is about half the calories of that ketchup…keeping the sugar down even more.
Many years ago I saw a recipe for slicing them super thin and applying a bit of cooking spray, then baking them to end up with chips (i.e. “crisps” to BE folks). Never got a good result but I didn’t have an air fryer. May have to try that again.
Often the main ingredients in processed foods were bred, managed, and harvested entirely with production and shipping in mind, and have very little flavor. Manufacturers add a lot of salt and sugar so they’ll taste like something; and probably also because those are both preservatives; and possibly in some cases because they’re cheaper than the supposed* main ingredients. People get accustomed to large amounts of salt and sugar, so that’s what tastes right to them.
IMO, sweet potatoes don’t need any added sugar unless you’re making a dessert with them, and then they don’t need very much.
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a lot of ingredient labels, which are legally required at least in the US to be in order of amount in the product, read like this: 1) Supposed Main Ingredient. 2) Sugar source. 3) additional food ingredient, maybe. 4) another sugar source 5) another sugar source 6) spice or maybe another food ingredient 7) another sugar source . . .
If you add up all the sugar sources, I suspect they’d often have to be listed as ingredient 1.
Not much more to say; dumping sugar in everything is now the American way. There’s massive sugar in salad dressing for gosh sakes.
If you watch any cooking show that involves sweating or sauteeing onions, or cooking carrots the host will say something like “Now I’ll add 1/4c of sugar to bring out the natural sweetness in the onions/carrots.” At which point I scream at the TV: “No you stupid f***! You mean you’ll drown the veg’s natural taste in sugar because you and your benighted audience have no taste buds left!”
As to cooking sweet pots one of my favorite ways is mashed w curry. Slice them thin (<1/4") & steam 20-ish minutes to soft then mash. For 2 good sized pots add ~1/4c warmed half & half or cream & 2-3 tbsp of your favorite curry powder. It’s really a neat combination. Which can be as spicy-hot or as spicy-flavorful as the curry you choose.
My cousin used to experiment with growing different types of sweet potatoes and they varied in their texture and sweetness. In Hawaii, we have two common types of sweet potato. Satsuma, which is yellow when cooked, sweet and almost yam like in texture and Okinawan which is purple, less sweet and firmer textured. In between were the different hybrids that my cousin experimented with, trying to find that perfect mix of sweetness and firmness.
One of the favorite things one of my Aunts would make is mashed fried sweet potato. This was only made with Okinawan sweet potatoes, and used mochi flour and sugar. It didn’t work with Satsuma sweet potatoes because the flesh was too soft and adding sugar would make it overly sweet.
As a dessert, sure, add in all the sugar you want. I don’t mind those two sweet potato casserole variants on Thanksgiving because to some degree the holiday is about gluttony.
I started liking them when I was served mashed sweet potatoes, like mash potatoes but with the sweets. That actually tasted good to me. Maybe if they had been served to me like that all along I would have been eating them most of my life.
Yep, I feel the same way. Again, I mostly cook at home from scratch so I just never numbed my taste buds to salt.
Yep, I know people who will simply refuse to eat strawberries unless there is added sugar. Why? Well, they probably think I’m nuts for NOT adding sugar.
Terra chips has a sweet potato version, as well as sweet potato chips being part of their original chip mix. Wish Terra would put out a bag of just all tarro chips, as those are my favorite from them. Aldi has their own version of Terra chips, which also have a sweet potato option. They’re pretty good, and another instance where sugar is not added.
::: blink blink :::
Probably just as well I don’t watch cooking shows - really, adding sugar to onions and carrots? That’s just… never done in my kitchen.
Growing up we’d always have a can of sweetened yams from the can on the Thanksgiving table. It was always barely touched, but we had to have it along with the canned cranberry sauce, which was also barely touched.
When was first told that those canned yams were the same thing as the delicious ones we’d get from my cousin’s farm, I didn’t believe it!
My father was raised by his grandparents in Minnesota circa 1920. The would put sugar on their sliced tomatoes. It wasn’t until he moved away to California at age 17 he discovered he liked tomatoes after all.