The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Mashed sweet potatoes with garlic anything but boring
There are certain vegetables that I bring home and have a stare-off with for a while before cooking them.
I think sweet potatoes top the list, partly because they will last forever, so the staring contest can go on for quite some time. And partly because they have eyes. Oh, yes, you are right, I am so funny.
While I love sweet potatoes simply mashed with some butter and milk and not much else, that can be boring.
Then, because of the naturally sweet nature of these potatoes, the tendency is to go for seasonings and flavors that underscore or amplify the sweetness. But that gets predictable as well.
Anyway, in my quest for different, for savory, and for not a lot of extra thinking, I picked roasted garlic as the newest uncomplicated addition to sweet potatoes. I’m fairly certain this recipe is going to wiggle its way into the regular rotation. Start with about 8 cloves of the roasted garlic, which will give the dish a nice but not too intense garlicky flavor, and add more if you want a more pronounced hit of garlic.
There are many types of sweet potatoes, and if you are a fan, have at it and get to know the different kinds. The exteriors and interiors range considerably in color, but most common are shades of white, tan and all sorts of oranges.
In this recipe, I tested with an organic sweet potato with a very pale cream interior (kind of the color of Yukon golds). Next time I might look for orange sweet potatoes, since I am a sucker for the color and it makes a holiday
table feel like a holiday table to me.
If you haven’t ever tried making roasted garlic, just do that today. Start the garlic before you start the potatoes,
so the garlic will be roasted when you are ready to mash. It’s stupidly, stupidly easy. And such a simple way to change up the flavor of everything from a crostini
topping to a sauce to a chicken dish.
If you want a milder garlic flavor in the potatoes, cut back on the number of cloves you mash in.