The Best Baked Sweet Potato Recipe (Brown Butter, Bacon & Herbs) | Wicked Spatula (2024)

FAQs

Why do you soak sweet potatoes before baking? ›

Place all your wedges into a bowl of cold water, give them a swish around with your hand and allow them to soak for at least 30mins, but the longer the better. This will pull out the starch from the potato and prevent them from going gloopy in the centre once baked. Drain away water and thoroughly dry the wedges.

They're dirty! Washing the sweet potatoes not only eliminates actual particles of dirt, but it also introduces some moisture to the skin, which prevents it from turning tough or leathery in the high heat of the oven.

Wrapping sweet potatoes in foil helps in a few ways. It prevents the exterior of the tuber from drying out and overheating too quickly, which would minimize enzymatic activity; it also results in a more evenly cooked texture.

Why use salt water for soaking potatoes? There's moisture naturally found in potatoes, and moisture is drawn to higher concentrations of salt. (This is a process called osmosis.) So, if you put the potatoes in a salt water bath, that will help draw out some of their moisture, resulting in crispier fries.

Boil the sweet potatoes in a large stockpot until soft, about 25 minutes; drain. When cool enough to handle, peel the potatoes and transfer them to a large bowl. While the potatoes are still warm, add the butter, cream, agave, cinnamon and salt, and mash until smooth. Sprinkle with the orange zest.

If you're serving your oven baked sweet potatoes as a side dish, pair them with your favorite protein or vegetarian chili. For a topping, stick to butter, Greek yogurt, or sour cream, or try adding a dollop of cilantro lime dressing, tzatziki, chipotle sauce, pesto, guacamole, or a drizzle of tahini sauce.

Boiling sweet potatoes retains more beta-carotene and makes the nutrient more absorbable than other cooking methods such as baking or frying. Up to 92% of the nutrient can be retained by limiting the cook time, such as boiling in a pot with a tightly covered lid for 20 minutes.

How to tell if sweet potatoes have gone bad. If your sweet potato is soft in spots, smells rotten, or oozes a mysterious liquid, that potato should be discarded. Another sign that sweet potatoes have taken a turn for the worse is if they start growing stalky purplish sprouts.

Do you have to poke holes in sweet potatoes before baking? Typically holes are poked into a sweet potato to prevent a potato exploding in your oven. However, the chance of that happening is low, and according to Lifehacker, sweet potatoes will retain more flavor if you don't poke them.

Why do you soak sweet potatoes in water before cooking? ›

TIPS & TRICKS to Make this Recipe: The main secrets to achieving that incredible crispy texture, is to soak the cut sweet potatoes in cold water for at least 30 minutes. This helps remove the starch from the sweet potatoes so they´re not limp & soggy.

Soaking potatoes in water helps remove excess starch. Excess starch can inhibit the potatoes from cooking evenly as well as creating a gummy or sticky texture on the outside of your potatoes. Cold water is used because hot water would react with the starch activating it, making it harder to separate from the potatoes.

Transfer to a bowl filled with ice and water and let it soak for 30 minutes. The cold water helps with removing excess starch and crisping up the potatoes later.

As the amount of sugar solution increases in the other containers, the mass of the potato cores goes down. If the water is highly concentrated with sugar, the water actually leaves the potato because there is a higher concentration of pure water in the potato than there is in the sugar water.

Some recipes call for soaking the sweet potatoes in water before cooking them to help remove some of the starch and make them more crispy but have found that this step isn't necessary for sweet potatoes as they don't have as much starch as regular potatoes.