butter; lemon; caramelized sweet potato
A good side dish can compliment the main dish in many ways that might even enhance the overall dinner experience. If a side dish overpowers and outshines a main dish, you might just as well have made the side dish as the main dish! Some side dishes deserve to be main dishes, in my opinion. Too many times now I had side dishes that totally outshine a main dish.
Oven-baked side dishes come in so many different forms, and there are so many out there. I love a good sweet potato baked dish, especially when the sweet potato caramelizes at the edges and gets kind of crispy. I have made many different sweet potato dishes and I have written some recipes down as well. (See, for example, my sweet potato fries, some ravioli, or even just a savoury wild herb sweet potato dish.) I have yet to write up this recipe, one that I make many times, but which I changed up a bit.
Usually, I make this dish with either orange or tangerine juice, a recipe, if I remember correctly, I have only mentioned a long time ago. This time round, however, I tried it with lemon juice, and it also worked out great! So, I think I can say with a certain amount of confidence that any citrus and sweet potato will go great together.
So, without further ado, please follow along with me as I show you how I make this dish!
Recipe/Ingredients
This recipe will yield about six side dish portions. We were four people, and some of us had second helpings. I used the following ingredients:
- 2 medium-sized sweet potatoes,
- 2 medium-sized lemons, juice and zest, and
- about 50-80 grams of butter.
(As you can see, I used a purple and orange sweet potato. In the future, I will only use the orange one, as it was much more "juicy" and sweet. The purple one dried out too much.)
Method/Process
Side dishes are not supposed to be too complex, in my opinion. If they are, there are ample reasons then to make it a main dish. I thus kept it very simple. Cut, baste, and bake. I started by cutting the pieces into relatively thin half-moon circles.
Feeling a tad bit fancy, I arranged the half-moon circles in a nice pattern. If I were feeling extra fancy, I would have placed them in a purple-orange-purple arrangement. But I was in a hurry to finish this side dish, so I did not do that.
For the basting sauce, I kept it really simple. You can obviously add many things to this sauce, from rosemary to chilli to so many other flavourings. Lemon and other citrus fruits pair so well with different herbs and spices. This is merely a blank canvas on which you can begin to draw your own artwork.
I started with zesting my lemons. This is where the most "lemon" flavour will be. So make sure to get all of the zest!
I melted the butter on the stove top, and I added all of the lemon juice and zest to the butter. (The amounts in the pots are way more than the recipe above, as I used the same basting for my main dish as well. So do not go by how much I added to the pot in the photographs below.)
I boil the butter and lemon a bit to both infuse the lemony flavour but to also brown the butter a bit. The toasty-lemony flavour is out of this world!
When I was done with this, I added it over the layered arrangement of sweet potato slices. Make sure that there is enough butter or any oil you choose to use. You can obviously add too much oil, but adding too little oil will also not yield a good dish!
Some people prefer their vegetables and food (meat and so on) to be cooked without adding too much colour to them. I know of people who like their vegetables to have absolutely no colour. I am not one of those. I prefer my food and vegetables to be close to being burnt. Just shy of burning yield in my opinion the most flavour.
So, I added my sweet potato dish to a very hot oven, between 200 and 220 Celsius for about 30-45 minutes. Depending on how thick you have cut the pieces, and a bunch of other variables (like oven size) you will need to figure out how long they will bake in your oven. But in my case, I left them in for about 45 minutes with the oven on, and then 20 minutes or so with the oven off. This is the trick to get some of the pieces to dry out a bit and get crispy!
After 45 minutes
After 25 minutes
And there you have it, it is really that simple to make this side dish! I love any citrus with sweet potato and with this rendition of an old recipe of mine, I illustrated that I can also use lemon juice and not just orange or tangerine juice. We had this side dish with some fish, a very common side dish that we have when we eat fish. "Patat en vis/snoek," is a common meal name in my home language. In an earlier post, I wrote about my process of cooking/braai-ing "snoek" or snake mackerel, a local favourite here where I live.
The buttery-lemony sauce coats the whole sweet potato slice, the edges are crispy and the interior soft. I just really love the contrast in texture and the flavour combination.
In any case, I really hope that you try this recipe out. Please let me know if you did, and how it went! And please let me know if you do something similar, I would love to know!
For now, happy cooking, and keep well.
All of the writings in this post are my own, and the recipe is also my own. The photographs were taken with my iPhone.