Balls and Walnuts
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Yammykins
The wife and I prefer sweet potato pie to pumpkin pie, candied yams to mashed sweet potatoes. Yes, I’m pretending yams and sweet potatoes are interchangeable, and I know they’re not. This is a garnet yam:
Garnet yams. Note the red skin and orange flesh.
And this is a sweet potato:
The sweet potato: light brown skin, yellow to orange flesh.
If I slip and say “sweet potato,” I mean “garnet yam,” AKA “the tasty one.” And that goes for sweet potato pie, too: when I make it, I use garnet yams. Similarly, my version of pumpkin ravioli in sage brown butter sauce uses garnet yams, not pumpkin (although I have used canned pumpkin in a pinch).
Here’s how I do my candied yams.
Serves three.
Buy one nice fat garnet yam.
In a sauce pot with a cover, melt 2 to 4 tablespoons of butter, then dump in about 1/2 cup of brown sugar. Add about 2 tablespoons of water, stir, cover the sauce pot, and let the mixture simmer while you’re peeling and slicing the yam. I’ve added salt on occasion; it doesn’t seem to alter the flavor much.
Peel the yam and slice it into disks about 1/2 to 3/4 inch thick. Add the slices to the brown sugar and butter mixture, turn once to coat them, and simmer (with the cover on). Chances are excellent your sauce pot is too small to permit all slices to lie in a single layer, so you’ll have to occasionally turn the slices to make sure everyone cooks evenly.
Typically, I’ll simmer these for 45 min to an hour or more. The yams will give up a bit of water, so don’t worry about adding water. You can test them with a fork to see if they’re as soft as you like them to be.
Serve with ham (tonight, slow-cooked in a crock pot with Coca Cola, brown sugar, and hot yellow mustard) and corn bread (hey, I just follow the package recipe!) Comfort food for the Jewish apostate.
Yam disks roast well, too. For this recipe, I cut slightly thicker disks (3/4 to 1 inch), toss them in some vegetable oil, and salt them lightly. Roast on a foil-lined cookie sheet at 400F for about an hour, turning them at thirty minutes. They’re surprisingly sweet even without all that brown sugar.
How do you do your yams? And don’t tell me about all those nasty marshmallow recipes. That’s like sprinkling sugar all over your cotton candy.
D.
My favorite yam dish: a casserole that is almost souffle-ish — it’s dessert, really. No marshmellows, just eggs, butter, pecans and sugar.
My family seems to adore pumpkin pie, but sweet potato pie is by far better IMO. My BIL makes an excellent sweet potato pecan pie for Thanx, since my sister shares the pumpkin pie distaste. [Well, really, it’s more a distaste for the canned pumpkin puree. Scratch pumpkin pie can be good, but is way too much work.]
We bake’em, just like a russet potato. Serve with butter and, maybe, a little brown sugar.
jmc: yam souffle DOES sound good. Where do the pecans go — bottom or top?
Tam, that’s how my parents always prepared them. They caramelize well in the oven.
I nuke mine for 5-8 minutes and then bake for a half hour to finish them off, then peel, slice while still slightly firm, but not yet mush, pan fry them, cover them in balti curry sauce with lots of sweet sauteed onion and eat cold the next day. Lots of cardamom and kalonji seed cooked with the onion.
Now, that’s an interesting recipe. Balti curry? Kalonji seed? Time to google . . .
We like Bourbon Twice-Baked Sweet Potatoes: bake at 350 for an hour or so, until the flesh pulls away from the skin and they start looking shriveled (most time, juice will ooze though holes in skin, and burn into an enormous mass of inflated carbon – it makes kind of a mess, but it’s worth it). Peel the skins off (you might want to let them cool – I usually don’t leave time for this and burn my fingers), then mash them with a scrambled egg (raw), cream, nutmeg, a little cayenne, brown sugar and a shot of bourbon. Put in a baking dish and return to the over for 20 minutes or so, until they’re heated through again.
Pecans on top, with some brown sugar. I tried mixing the pecans in with the eggs and yams once: it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t quite right.
Those Bourbon Twice-Baked Sweet Potatoes sound very good.
Hi Chris! Sounds lovely. Funny thing, I don’t like bourbon as a beverage, but it’s great in cooking.
jmc: that’s what I thought, but I was wondering whether the weight of the pecans would keep the souffle from rising.
Kalonji seed are black onion seeds and I use the Patak brand Balti paste (not ready made sauce but spice blend paste) and add my own chunky tomatoes to it. Tinned tomatoes if I’m in a rush.
Kalonji seeds are awesome baked into bread.
I forgot to say, in your pictures, Both types are called sweet potato here, but the garnets are more likely to be smaller and organic, where the yam is common, huge and cheap.
Oh, I forgot pecans! You can put pecans on top of the bourbon-yam thingy before baking it.
And yeah, I agree with you about the bourbon – it’s excellent for cooking, but for drinking, not so much.
Black onion, aka nigella, aka black cumin. Good stuff.
My secret yam ingredient is… Chinese 5-spice powder. Yum.
And y’all clearly haven’t had decent bourbon 🙂
I dunno, there’s just something about straight bourbon or bourbon on the rocks that gives me heartburn. I do better with a good Scotch or Rye, best of all with Irish Whiskey, which seems very smooth to me.
I’m definitely gonna have to find nigella. These are interesting ideas . . .