Smokehouse Mashed Sweet Potatoes

(from 226-2tone’s recipe box)

Serves 4 to 6

This recipe can be doubled and prepared in a Dutch oven, but the cooking time will need to be doubled as well.

WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS:
While developing our Smokehouse Mashed Sweet Potatoes recipe, we found that the right temperature and the right slice were key. We thinly sliced the sweet potatoes and cooked them covered, on the stovetop, on low heat with a small amount of butter and cream. The low heat allowed the potatoes in our recipe to release their liquid, which produced the steam that cooked them.

Source: Cook's Country December/January 2007 (from RecipeThing user Bethany)

Ingredients

  • 4 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into 4 pieces
  • 3 tablespoons heavy cream
  • 1 teaspoon sugar
  • 1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
  • 2 pounds sweet potatoes (2 large or 3 medium), peeled, quartered lengthwise, and cut into 1/4-inch-thick slices

Directions

  1. Combine butter, 2 tablespoons cream, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon pepper, sugar, and sweet potatoes in large saucepan. Cook, covered, over low heat until potatoes are fall-apart tender, 35 to 40 minutes.

  2. Off heat, add remaining tablespoon cream and mash sweet potatoes with potato masher. Serve.

  3. NO-BOIL SWEET POTATOES: Boiling sweet potatoes in lots of liquid—as you would regular potatoes—is not a good idea. Sweet potatoes will soak up too much water, and the resulting mash will be a soggy mess. Better to cook them in a small amount of of liquid. Just 2 tablespoons of heavy cream (plus a little butter), along with the water released from the sweet potatoes as they cook, is enough to steam them into tenderness.

  4. THE SLICE IS RIGHT: We found that using a knife to evenly cut the lemons into paper-thin slices was a difficult and time-consuming task. We had better results with a mandoline (or V-slicer), which produced perfectly thin slices in no time at all. If you don’t have a mandoline, we did find another piece of kitchen equipment that will make the process easier—the freezer. Popping the lemons into the freezer for about 30 minutes firms them up for better hand-slicing, which is best accomplished with a serrated knife.

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