How to Make Sweet Potato Skins Delicious
I have been receiving a lot of letters lately. Most of them are about baking soda and ground beef , one was about Stuart Murdock, and a fair amount about sweet potatoes, their skins, and how stupid I am for not eating them (the thing I mentioned in this frying blog ):
Unlike white potatoes such as blush or yukon, yams and sweet potatoes do not have a peel that is pleasant to eat. Instead of getting crunchy, they become tough, with a texture somewhere in the middle between paper and leather.
While no one objected to my description of skin texture, they convinced me to “consider the syrupy caramelized sweetness and rich aroma that can stick to the inside of the skin,” and “grease this bad guy liberally (or use butter or shortening) and sprinkle with coarse salt “. (Oddly enough, these emails were some of the most polite I have ever received, as opposed to the beefy emails , which were pretty rude.)
As a dedicated white potato peel shopper, I was somewhat embarrassed to find out what I was missing. So I did what the lovely, polite readers suggested and baked another sweet potato.
I kept the temperature and cooking time the same (400 ℉ for an hour in the oven / half than in the deep fat fryer) and did not pierce the skin, only this time I covered the sweet potato with bacon fat and Sicilian sea salt before baking. If you’ve never covered your roots with bacon fat, it’s very simple: scoop up some fat with (clean) fingers and rub the potatoes with your hands, then sprinkle with salt to form a shiny crust.
I must say that I was not disappointed in the results. While I stick with my initial estimate that the rind of the sweet potato is “leathery,” it was not chewable, and chewing on something filled with bacon fat is quite fun. (Vegetarians: Try olive oil or avocado oil.) The peel itself is quite bitter, but this bitterness goes well with the sweetness of the potatoes on the inside. In fact, the combination of sweet flesh, slightly bitter rind, and all those caramelized nuggets on the inside is pretty delicious.
But more importantly – no, most importantly – it means I never have to peel another sweet potato. And for those who like not to overdo it, this is great news.