crispy sweet potato roast

I have a complicated relationship with sweet potatoes. I think they’re one of these wonder vegetables — impossible to mess up cooking, pretty consistently delicious whether you buy them freshly-dug from the farmers market or from a grocery chain, aglow with vitamins A and C and chock full of fiber. (Which I mostly think about because I’m the mother of a sweet potato junkie.) I like them in cake, sweet biscuits and pie. I like them with goat cheese and a light vinaigrette, gratin-ed with a tangle of chard, with a strange-but-addictive mix of spices and roasted in wedges, and one-bowl-meal-ed with roasted broccoli, black rice and miso sauce. But I also have all sorts of quibbles with them. They’re never crispy enough. They’re rarely savory enough — basically, if you get within 10 feet of my savory sweet potato dish with cinnamon, I go into hiding. For me, the louder the contrast between their sweet, soft nature, the happier I am eating them.

Which means that it was only a matter of time before I took this pretty-pretty crispy potato roast from the archives and tried to put a Thanksgiving spin on it. The ta-da factor is strong here and the workload manageable. You thinly slice a whole lot of sweet potatoes and arrange them in a butter and olive oil-brushed dish, and brush them with even more. You can slide slivers of shallots between the sweet potato pages. You’ll want to shower the whole thing with salt and black pepper or red pepper flakes. You bake it with foil on long enough that the insides get tender and without foil long enough to get the tops brown and crispy. This is not your standard holiday sweet potato mash.

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deb perelman

crispy sweet potato roast