Sweet Potatoes….lovely and delicious sweet potatoes. I cook sweet potatoes often and was looking for a new way to prepare them. I had inspiration the other day from a recipe that I saw in Cooks Illustrated for salt baked potatoes. If you could salt bake a russet why not a sweet potato? I got right to work because I wanted had to try this out. At first I was concerned about the many steps and the fact that you had to use a lot of salt. The recipe required hot ovens, large amounts of salt and long cooking times. Not usually a good combo for me but I was interested to find out what the outcome would be if I used sweet potatoes instead of russet potatoes. If you have never had salt roasted russet potatoes you should. The skin becomes tender and delicious and the inside is positively heavenly. The meat of the potato becomes fluffy, slightly sweet and tender. Surprisingly all of the salt does not make the potatoes too salty.
So, on with the experiment. I washed up the sweet potatoes. Dried them well. Laid them out in a bed of kosher salt and added my garlic and fresh rosemary sprigs.
I went through all of the steps and also did a control group where I roasted sweet potatoes in the oven simply wrapped in foil. When the salt roasted sweet potatoes were done cooking the difference was amazing. The salt roasted sweet potatoes were a dark red and fluffy and sweet where as the regular roasted sweet potato had lost most of its color and flavor.
The best part is the rosemary and garlic salt was cooled down and I keep using it on other dishes as a seasoning. You do not need to waste all of the kosher salt you used when baking the sweet potatoes. The garlic and rosemary really permeate the salt with a floral herb taste and a light garlic flavor.
If you would like to try salt roasted russet potatoes or red potatoes just use the same recipe as salt roasted sweet potatoes.
Salt Baked Sweet Potato
inspired by Cooks Illustrated
Ingredients
2-3 cups kosher salt
4 Sweet Potatoes
4 fresh rosemary sprigs
1 Whole head of garlic with the top cut off
4 tsp olive or canola oil
4 tbs of soft unsalted butter
Instructions
Heat oven to 450 degrees. Pour salt into a baking dish and gently push potatoes down into the salt covering half way up the sides of the sweet potatoes. Add rosemary sprigs and garlic, cut side up, to baking dish. Cover baking dish with foil. Bake for 1 hour.
Increase oven temperature to 500 degrees. Uncover sweet potatoes and remove garlic and rosemary. Brush potatoes with oil and finish uncovered in hot oven for 15 more minutes.
Remove garlic and from salt and mash up with butter to serve with potatoes.
Garlic and Rosemary salt can be saved and re-used for seasoning other dishes and will keep for up to 3 months.
