If this wasn’t so utterly delicious, I’d almost say it doesn’t count as a recipe, but since I had to discover it by accident, I’m gonna save you from possibly never discovering it.
Prep time: 10 minutes. Cooking time: 1-2 hours unsupervised.
What you need:
Orange-fleshed sweet potatoes (The smallest you find with undamaged flesh/no blemishes)
Deep tray
Oven
Instructions:
These can be done at any temperature above 180 degrees Celsius/356 Fahrenheit (ie cake baking temperature), so normally I do them when I’m making something else in the oven. You simply wash the sweet potatoes (don’t scrub, you don’t want to damage the skin) and place them on a tray with some depth to it, not too high in the oven if the grill is on. Then leave them for at least an hour, depending on size it can be two or even three! At such low temperatures, the sweet potato will cook and shrink inside its own skin… and its liquid content will caramelize.
If you catch it at the right stage, you will find a perfect puddle of caramel you can scoop out with a fork and eat like candy. After an hour, flip the potatoes so the other side gets more direct heat from the bottom of the pan and its layer of caramel.
How do you know they are done? When you can press a finger and you notice they feel a
bit empty (because the flesh has shrunk but the potato skin is still the same). Remove from oven and consume, or let them cook and reheat for next meal. Reheating carbs in general makes them a little less of a sugar rush, so that’s neat trick if you are trying not to get those post-eating slumps.
Serve with salt and plenty of olive oil drizzled on top.
Or use for baking, or cut pieces to drop into your omelettes/lentils to make them yummier.
Can you think of what else to do with them? Tell us in the comments!
P.S: If you have Japanese (aka the purple outside, white inside) sweet potatoes instead, you can follow the same procedure, but I like to use the flesh of those for gnocchi (recipe coming up) and cottage/shepherds pie instead of eating them straight.