Chili Stuffed Sweet Potatoes Recipe (2024)

FAQs

Why do you soak sweet potatoes before baking? ›

The cold water bath helps rinse the starch off the sweet potatoes so they're a bit more crispy. That said, if you do not have the time, you can still get crispy baked sweet potato fries by using high heat and a little drizzle of olive oil.

Despite what your grandmother says, this cloying side dish didn't originate as a family recipe. It was concocted by Big Marshmallow as a way to push the candy on Americans. Though the tubers are high in sugar to begin with, there's historical precedent for treating sweet potatoes like dessert.

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.

One 15-ounce can of sweet potatoes equals one cup of fresh sweet potatoes. Canned sweet potatoes are precooked, so add them at the end of a recipe.

Types of Potatoes to Soak

"Sweet potatoes can also be peeled and stored in water for up to 24 hours."

Do You Have to Peel Sweet Potatoes Before Roasting Them? Not at all! However, if you'd prefer to do so you certainly can! The skin of the sweet potato is thicker and tougher than the rest of your sweet potato, so if that's undesirable to you feel free to remove the skin.

The Bottom Line. You can eat sweet potato skin. It's a good source of fiber, a nutrient that may help lower the risk of heart disease and keep you feeling full for longer periods of time. The next time you make a sweet potato dish, whether it's a roasted side dish or a hearty, cozy casserole, leave the peel on.

The ooze is actually referred to as "sap." It is made up of sugar and starch combined with the moisture found in the vegetable, and it escapes out of the damage made from the knife. The sap really equals the sweetness. If it's pouring out of your potato, that means it's a sweet and delicious vegetable.

Before baking, use a fork to prick each sweet potato several times. You don't need to jab the fork in deep. We're creating steam vents. Otherwise the pressure in the sweet potato could build up so high in the oven that it explodes—an unlikely possibility but one best avoided!

Do I wash sweet potatoes before baking? ›

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.

Baking whole sweet potatoes in the oven or cutting them into cubes and roasting them caramelizes the potatoes' starchy flesh, making it sweeter and giving it a silky smooth texture. Even if you are making mashed sweet potatoes, they will taste better with oven-cooked potatoes.

Leaving the syrup on the yams can hamper their taste. Rinsing sweet potatoes of any leftover sugary film will uphold their integrity, giving you the most authentic sweet potato taste and texture.

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.

The best canned yams (aka canned sweet potatoes) are sweet, tender, and taste as good as fresh yams when you use them to make candied yams or a sweet potato casserole for Thanksgiving.

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.

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.

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. The longer it sits in the ice, the better.

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.