Sweet Potato Purée
…Or in my case, Sweet Potato Not-So-Pureed-But-Rather-Chunky-and-Princess-Colored-Sweet-and-Sour-Magic.
I thought this would make for just the perfect Thanksgiving recipe today — delicious sweet potatoes with minimal ingredients and fuss — sounded right up my alley! Well, it didn’t go perfectly as planned, but it sure made for some funny pictures!
Sweet Potato Puree comes from page 406 of Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats by Sally Fallon. It’s super simple. And, I was pleasantly surprised to see that although you would think you’d need to lug out a big food processor to “puree” the potatoes as it says, the recipe just instructs you to mash them by hand! Sally, you’re trying to get all fancy on us. These are pretty much just baked mashed potatoes. 😉
Click HERE to enter to win TWO copies of the book in our 25 Days of Nourishing Traditions Giveaway!
Ingredients
(Serves 6)
- 4 large sweet potatoes
- grated rind of two lemons
- juice of two lemons
- 1⁄2 cup butter softened
- 2 egg yolks
- 1⁄2 teaspoon sea salt
If you use the super-amazing Plan to Eat meal planning site, just add me as a “friend” and you can take each of my recipes that I’ve already uploaded, and add them to your recipe box! Then you can plug them into your meal calendar, have instant shopping lists created with all your ingredients, and more! Here’s my PTE link for Sweet Potato Puree.
Instructions
I didn’t really need to feed six people sweet potatoes, so I decided to cut the recipe roughly in half for Pre-Hubs and I. And, I used a sweet potato local to my area called Okinawan sweet potatoes — they are bright purple inside! I eat these a lot. This is how I usually prepare them:
Diced and fried in butter!
But for this recipe, Sally says to boil the potatoes in water until tender, then peel them while they are still hot (hold them with pot holders so you don’t get burned). Then, place in a bowl and start mashing.
I put my butter in there right away so it would melt with the hot potatoes.
Uh, oops! My taters were still kinda hard in the middle! Dang it. Should have boiled them longer! Well I kept mashing them and decided it was fine that my potatoes didn’t get “pureed,” but were rather lumpy.
Next, it’s time to add in the other ingredients. I started with the lemon juice — and boy was I surprised at what happened when it mixed into my purple potato mash!
They began to turn HOT PINK!
For real! This is not the first time my Okinawan potatoes have done something crazy and changed colors on me. But this was intense!
I mixed in the other ingredients, then piled the pinkness into a buttered loaf pan (my casserole dish was otherwise occupied) and set her in the oven at 350.
After about 1/2 hour, the bright magenta magic was done.
How’d it go?
Well, I kinda messed up with the boiling time like I mentioned, so these didn’t turn out like a smooth purée as planned. And obviously, the bizarre color was a big surprise! But other than that, making these was pretty painless and totally doable even for a cooking newbie. I like the idea of baking mashed potatoes — super easy and gives them a nice texture.
How we liked it
Umm… it was a little too lemony for our taste. I put in about 3/4 of a very large lemon (grown here, they are much different and look more like oranges) for the 2 1/2 potatoes I used, and I think it was a bit much. Next time, I’ll put in just a hint of the lemon. Maybe the sourness works better with more *normal* sweet potatoes — and not so much princessy purple and pink ones? I’m quite sure it would actually. So even though mine didn’t turn out amazing, I’d still recommend you try the recipe!
But, the purple potatoes sure made it more fun. And if you’ve got young girls in your home, I can only imagine how excited they would be to find “Princess Potatoes” (as we now call them) on the table at Thanksgiving! See if you can get your hands on some Okinawan ‘taters and they’ll be the hit of the kid table this year. Guaranteed! 🙂
What do you think of this sweet potato recipe? Will you try it out with normal sweet potatoes and see how it goes? I’m pretty sure they won’t turn pink!
Be sure to check out the other installments of 25 Days of Nourishing Traditions:
I think I would try this with less lemon too. I like the way sweet potatoes taste when they are baked.
I think sweet potatoes are fine w/o any other ingredient. If you bake them it’s easy to just stick a fork in them to test them. Also, it is very easy to get the peel off and they are easy to mash. (My LLMD – Lyme Literate MD, says to bake them, instead of boiling, so you don’t lose the nutrients.
This is hilarious! I would love to have had a try!
I will try :)!
The potatoes are probably boiled in order to help them soften up and be less dry. The purple sweet potatoes are supposedly dryer, harder, and less sweet than the orange one (generally).