Best Roasted Sweet Potatoes

Ingredienser

Sweet potatoes

Oil

Salt

Seasoning

Aluminum foil

Vejledning

Cut the sweet potatoes into even-sized pieces: 1/2"-thick half-moons or 3/4" cubes are fair game. Toss the sweet potatoes with oil and salt, arrange on a bare metal baking sheet, and cover the pan with foil, crimping to seal.

Place the baking sheet in a cold oven and set the oven to 450°. Let the sweet potatoes slowly cook in the oven for 20 minutes as the oven heats up, then remove the foil and let the sweet potatoes continue to roast until browned on the bottom and tender, about 10 minutes more. You’ll be rewarded with the lightly caramelized, bright orange sweet potatoes that taste more flavorful and sweet than you even knew was possible.

Notater

Sweet potatoes naturally contain amylase, an enzyme that converts starches to sugars. Raw sweet potatoes are mostly starch, but during the cooking process, the raised temperature of the sweet potato activates that enzyme, causing it to start converting some of that sweet potato’s starch into maltose (a type of sugar). The resulting cooked sweet potato tastes noticeably sweeter than it would have had we tasted it raw.

Some of that starch-to-sugar conversion will happen regardless of how you cook the sweet potato. (Heck, you could even pop that sweet potato in the microwave and zap it for 5 minutes and get some starch-to-sugar transformation!) But if you want the sweetest, most flavorful sweet potatoes, you’ll want to maximize the opportunity for that starch to sugar conversion by lengthening the time the enzyme is active. And—here’s the catch—the enzyme is only fully active when the sweet potato is between 135° and 170°.

If you start roasting sweet potatoes in a fully heated 425° oven, they’ll shoot through that key temperature range in no time flat. But if you start them in a cold oven and allow them to warm gradually with the oven as it heats up, you’re giving the enzyme maximum time to work, and this results in sweeter, more flavorful sweet potatoes. It’s that simple.

https://www.delish.com/kitchen-tools/kitchen-secrets/a69908407/how-to-roast-sweet-potatoes/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us