Whipped Sweet Potatoes with Caramelized Apples
4 large sweet potatoes (3lbs)
3 Tb unsalted butter, softened
2 Tb heavy cream
1/2 c applesauce
2 tsp fresh ginger, grated
kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 apples, peeled and cored
3 Tb sugar
Place sweet potatoes on a parchment-lined baking sheet; pierce each several times with a fork. Bake until very tender when pierced with a paring knife, about 50 minutes. Remove from oven and let cool slightly.
Cut open potatoes and scoop out flesh into bowl of an electric mixer, fitted with paddle attachment. Add 2Tb butter and cream and beat until smooth. Add the applesauce and ginger. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Transfer to an oven-proof serving dish and bake at 375 F until heated through (10 minutes).
Cut the apples into 1″ pieces. Melt the remaining Tb butter in a non stick skillet over medium-high heat. Add apples and sugar; saute until golden and nicely caramelized, about 8 minutes. Top potatoes with apples and serve immediately. Serves 6.
I got this recipe from a girl named Kate who got it from a guy named Royal and a girl named Susan. These sweet potatoes make me feel like God is smiling down on me.
Happy Thanksgiving.
By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog 
So the Godly mixed feeling about this masterpiece come from where? Bulging waistlines?
I don’t think He has mixed feelings at all. I’m sure he believes sweet potatoes topped with marshmallows are an abomination, as all right thinking people do.
I make mashed sweet potatoes with orange and ginger. I hear they’re very tasty, but I don’t eat them myself.
I like the sweet potatoes with the pecan topping. It’s almost like pie. I can’t eat them any other way.
I’m pretty sure God thinks yams (not sweet potatoes as they are so frequently misidentified) are celestial. Ditto with rutabagers – an other vegetable with poor PR.
Personally I love yams with marshmellows. Although I had some cut super thin and then quick seared in a pan with chicken broth and butter. The slices were then restacked. It was heaven!
Sweet potatoes I don’t care for as much. (Typically they are not orange – if your vegetable is orange rather than light it’s probably a yam) I have had some pretty amazing sweet potato pie while living in the south though.
Sweet potatoes (not yams) alternated with russets or Yukons make a pretty amazing gratin with some walnuts and Gruyere.
I actually don’t mind the marshmallow version, but playing up the savory side with curry or garam masala is not a bad treatment of sweet potatoes OR yams.
wow, that sounds amazing Kristine.
Clark, I’m going with usage here. I know the difference but it turns out hardly any grocery store ever labels these correctly. Even snooty ones in Cambridge MA. Or the upper West side. It’s either yams are sweet potatoes or vice versa or everything is a sweet potato. Or there are no actual sweet potatoes in the store just yams. But no one knows what a yam is. So I say, everyone calls everything sweet potatoes. Pretty much. So I do too. I’m a follower. What can I say?
This recipe is best however with the white fleshy kind (sweet potatoes, sometimes called yams).
The marshmallow recipe is too sweet in my mind to have a place on a Thanksgiving plate.
I briefly considered ditching the very wonderful family recipe for candied yams this year (and by the way, if you look at a can, it says both “yams” and “sweet potatoes”) and doing the even more wonderful sweet, buttery, peppery Caramelized Butternut Squash. Mmmm. Drool. But I decided that the traditionalists among us might squawk, so I’ll be scrubbing up those sweet potatoes (or whatever they are) and cooking them in a lot of butter and brown sugar. Not for the faint of heart.
I’m not sure why that link didn’t work. Here it is in its plain, unadorned form:
http://www.recipezaar.com/Caramelized-Butternut-Squash-106627
Amri, this sounds great.
What kind of apples do you recommend?
Yeah, I know Amri, it’s just a pet peeve of mine.
Funny. I am a picky eater (my dad is from a foreign country so I think that has some to do w/my pickiness over American food).
A couple years ago, I had Christmas dinner w/two friends. We each brought items. The host wanted me to bring yams in addition to the other stuff I was bringing.
My other friend and I both cringed, as neither of us likes yams.
Thanks goodness for Boston Market selling yams, thanks to them our other friend was happy w/yams and all we had to do was put the container in the microwave!
jessawhy–I would go for Granny Smith. They’re easy to get end of November and they’re firm. The caramelizing will sweeten them up.
Your recipe sounds good, amri. But Kristine’s sounds better. Gruyere versus carmelized apples — sorry, that’s just not much of a contest.
They both sound great, Kaimi. As Nasreddin Hodja said, “you are right, and you are right, and you are right.”
Apples are all-American. Gruyere is French. Don’t be a terrorist, Kaimi.
meems is not a terrorist.
Not only do marshmellows make things too sweet for a place at the Thankgiving dinner table, it’s that marshmellows are so … low class.
There. I said it.
If somebody posted their sweet potato/russet/gruyere/walnut recipe I would be eternally grateful and would nab it in a heartbeat.
Jessawhy,
Forget Granny Smiths. The kind of apples you want for this recipe are little balls of Gruyere. :)
Jessawhy, don’t listen to him. He eats pineapple with parsnips!
That Kate you mentioned actually knows the answer. As I recall, it’s mostly an advertising gimmick in practice, but there are some complicated variations relating to where they’re grown. they’re all in the same family/genus/whatever, i think. i can vouch for that being a great dish.
She told me the score: basically everything sold in the US is a sweet potato. In the 1930s, sweet potato farmers who cultivated an orange-yellow variety decided they would be called Yams as an advertising gimmick to differentiate them from the white-fleshed varieties of sweet potatoes. confusion has continued since. it sounds like actual yams are a pretty inedible tuber not sold in the US.