Sweet potato casserole * how to bake a sweet potato

Sweet Potato Casserole

3 c. cooked sweet potatoes, mashed (about 3 15-oz cans, drained)

1 c. sugar

¼ c. milk

1 egg, beaten

1 tsp salt

2 tsp vanilla

1 tsp cinnamon or allspice (or ½ tsp each)

Topping:

½ c. butter, melted

1 c. brown sugar

½ c. all-purpose flour

1 c. pecans, chopped

Preheat oven to 350 Fahrenheit. Grease a 9x9 baking dish or casserole. Mix sweet potatoes with sugar, milk, egg, salt, vanilla, and spices, mix well, and pour into baking dish. Mix the topping and spread on the sweet potato mixture. Bake for 30 minutes.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make sweet potato casserole! This was an episode I had planned to run last November in the run-up to Thanksgiving, but you know what? You can have sweet potatoes whenever you like, not just at Thanksgiving.

Sweet potatoes are really easy to make and are a great accompaniment to a mild meat like turkey or chicken, or a salty meat like ham. This recipe is sweet without that gooey over-the-top marshmallow topping many people use, and the pecans give the dish a pleasant texture.

The easiest way to make sweet potato casserole is to use canned sweet potatoes. These are almost always marketed as yams but they’re the same thing as the whole sweet potatoes you can buy in the produce section as far as I know. But if you prefer to start with whole sweet potatoes instead of canned, I’ll give you directions for that too.

You’ll need a big mixing bowl, a small mixing bowl or large cereal bowl, and a casserole dish or something similar. I use a round Pyrex casserole dish but you can use a 9x9 pan. Grease it well and set it aside.

I’ll go over the canned sweet potato version of the recipe first because it’s so simple. You need about three cups of sweet potato, so either buy three of the smaller 15-oz cans or one big 29-oz can and one 15-oz can. Open the cans and drain them, then dump the potatoes into a big mixing bowl.

You’ll notice that the sweet potatoes are already peeled. They’re also already cooked. You just need to mash them. Use a fork, and don’t try to get them creamy smooth like regular mashed potatoes. You want your sweet potatoes to have more of a chunky texture than regular mashed potatoes. Mash them up good with the fork, breaking each piece up. You also want to remove any discolored or bruised areas and especially the tough fibers. Sweet potatoes are fibrous, especially at the ends, and those fibers are unpleasant to chew and hard to swallow—sort of like the string of a string bean. Don’t worry about the little bitty fibers, but fish out the longer pieces you notice or any mats of fiber.

Once the pieces are all mushed up reasonably well, you just dump all the rest of the ingredients on top of them and mix the whole thing up really well.

But let’s back up again and go over directions for baking your sweet potatoes from scratch. It’s easiest to do this in the microwave one at a time, and you can do it in advance.

First, you’re going to need to buy some sweet potatoes. Choose medium-sized ones, neither gigantic nor tiny. Sweet potatoes are funky in shape compared to regular potatoes, but choose ones that are roughly the size of a regular potato that you’d want to eat as a jacket potato. You’re going to want four or five of them at this size. Don’t think you can buy two gigantic ones instead, because a lot of times those really big ones have started to get woody inside. You can use really big or really small ones if that’s all you’ve got, but it’s easier to work with medium-sized ones. Try to choose sweet potatoes that aren’t too blemished, although it’s hard to find them that are perfect.

Give each potato a scrub in co