Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
How sweet it is
5 recipes that make the most of the unique sweet potato
There is no mistaking a sweet potato. You can’t eat one and wonder whether it is, perhaps, a zucchini. No one has ever sampled one and confused it with a turnip. It is impossible to take one for broccoli, or even a regular potato.
Sweet potato is a sweet potato is a sweet potato. Its uniqueness is both its curse and its charm. Nothing else is quite like it, but that also means its utility is limited. It is not something you would ever want to use as a substitute for another ingredient. It is, as they say, what it is.
One thing it isn’t, incidentally, is a yam. Though both are root vegetables, they are unrelated (for that matter, sweet potatoes are only distantly related to our common potatoes). They don’t even look alike — yams resemble horseradish roots and can grow to be more than 50 pounds — and yams are much less sweet, drier and starchier.
True yams are almost never sold in America, though you can sometimes find them in international markets. In general, if it is labeled either a yam or a sweet potato, it’s a sweet potato.
And that is fortunate, because I just cooked five dishes featuring sweet potatoes, and they were all delicious, down to the last orange crumb.
I started with chili, which is a good place to start in all circumstances. A friend had recommended a vegan sweet potato chili recipe so strenuously that I decided to give it a try.
Sweet and hot flavors always go well together, as long as they are not too extreme. In this chili, they are a perfect blend, with the mild natural sweetness of the sweet potato bringing out the best in the mild heat of the chili powder, and vice versa.
It makes a robust meal — heavy with black beans, tomatoes, diced onion and red bell pepper providing a foundation of flavor for the star attraction, the sweet potatoes.
Sweet potato fries, of course, are always popular. I thought about simply dropping them into hot oil and frying them, but then I came across a recipe for oven-baked fries.
Baking them in an oven allows the fries’ exterior to become crispy, or at least moderately crispy, while the interior is soft and creamy. They are just what fries should be, only sweeter than ordinary fries.
The next dish is similar in some ways to the oven-baked fries. Parmesan baked sweet potatoes are cooked the same way — tossed with a little bit of oil and then baked — so they have the same crisp and creamy textures. But the similarity ends there.
The fries are spiced with garlic powder, paprika, salt and black pepper; these intense flavors contrast nicely with the smooth, sweet taste of the sweet potatoes.
Next up was the baked-potato version of a sweet potato. The sweet potato here is baked whole until it is completely tender.
The extraordinary part comes from the sauce that is drizzled over the top.
The sauce begins with melted butter that has been browned, so it tastes a little nuttier. That is combined with a bit of honey and a dash of vinegar, for a subdued sweet-and-sour effect, and some crushed red pepper to bring on just enough heat.
If you like the sauce on sweet potatoes, you can try adding it to anything from winter squash to oatmeal to ice cream.
Last came dessert: Sweet potatoes are one of the very few vegetables that can legitimately be used in dessert.
I made a sweet potato pie. Of course I did. What else would a pie-lover make?
The ingredients may sound familiar: cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and cloves. It’s what goes into any pumpkin pie worth its salt (salt is also an ingredient). But what makes this sweet potato pie better than ordinary pumpkin pies are the other ingredients.
Along with the heavy cream and eggs, this pie also benefits from brown sugar and bourbon. These additions bring a rich and round depth to the pie. It is a flavor-forward dessert, where the ingredients all act in harmony to bring color and emphasis to the sweet potato at the heart of it all.