Loaded Baked Sweet Potatoes Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What flavors go well with sweet potatoes? ›

It's absolutely delicious to mash sweet potato with honey, butter, nutmeg and cinnamon. rosemary! I make sweet potato fries in the oven with just a pinch of salt and pepper, oil, and a ton of rosemary... absolutely delish!

The cold water bath helps rinse the starch off the sweet potatoes so they're a bit more crispy.

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.

The potatoes themselves get a rich, almost toffee-like complexity due to the slow roasting. Adding butter that's been cooked down until its milk solids just begin to turn brown and nutty accentuates that flavor even more. Some folks like to add cinnamon, nutmeg, or other spices to their sweet potatoes.

The American tradition of cooking sweet potatoes with marshmallows is a bit of a leap for the European reader.

Sweet potatoes are a fall crop because they take 100-150 days to mature. They are planted in the spring and harvested late August to early November.

The most common varieties in the U.S. are the Beauregard (the most widely grown cultivar), the jewel, and the garnet (also sometimes known as red yams).

The reason they are hard in the middle is cook them longer or on a higher temperature. Soaking will not help soften your sweet potato unless you are putting the potato and water in a pot on the stove and cooking it. If your sweet potato is still hard it's not cooked enough.

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.

Sweet potatoes grow in the ground, and skipping the cleaning step means dirt or grit can end up in your sweet potato casserole. Before cooking or cutting sweet potatoes, wash the skins and give them a scrub with a clean vegetable brush.

What meat to eat with baked sweet potatoes? ›

Sweetpotatoes tend to pair nicely with pork, pork chops and other pork dishes. This sheet pan pork chops and sweetpotatoes are a favorite!

Gastrointestinal Health

Along with anti-inflammatory properties, sweet potatoes have plenty of gut-friendly fiber, especially if you eat the skin. They are a mixture of soluble fiber, which can lower cholesterol and balance glucose, and insoluble fiber, which helps keep your bowels healthy and regular.

No, yams and sweet potatoes are not the same. Yams have rough, dark brown skin that is often compared to tree bark, and their flesh is dry and starchy like a regular potato. Sweet potatoes have smooth reddish skin, softer flesh (when cooked), and a sweet flavor.

Though they can both be part of a healthy diet, sweet potatoes are generally healthier than regular potatoes, partly because of their incredibly high vitamin A content. Sweet potatoes are also lower on the glycemic index, meaning that they are less likely than regular potatoes to make your blood sugar spike.

Sweet potatoes are full of antioxidants, vitamins and fiber to support your eye, digestive and heart health. They're generally safe to eat daily, especially if you eat them with calcium to prevent calcium oxalate kidney stones. There are so many fun and tasty ways to eat sweet potatoes.

As with boiling, calories, carbohydrate and fat were higher in the baked sweet potato per 100g, but protein was higher in the baked white potato (2.2 g vs 1.6g per 100g). Baked sweet potatoes contained more than double the fibre of the regular potato, with less starch but a lot more sugar.