Enough already. Stop with the marshmallows. Hold the brown sugar. Spare the cinnamon. If, like most Americans, your experience of the sweet potato begins and ends at the Thanksgiving dinner table, get ready for a culinary adventure. October is prime time for locally grown sweets. Plus, the best selection of unusual sweet potatoes peaks at supermarkets in fall.
The sweet potato most likely to appear at local farmers’ stands is a zaftig, round-in-middle lovely named Beauregard. With deep orange flesh and skin a color somewhere between magenta and burgundy, Beauregard is a beauty. Finely textured and moist with a lot of sweet and not much stringiness, the cultivar is a favorite with cooks for mashing, baking and making desserts. Farmers like Beauregard, too. “Old-time farmers are really attached to Beauregard, a variety grown in this area for more than 50 years,” said Walker Claridge of Terra Bella Farm and The Root Cellar in Columbia, Mo. “I’ve planted Jewell as well, but Beauregard is a customer favorite.” Jewell, light orange with a golden tan skin, has a dry texture best suited to roasting and light steaming. Both varieties will likely be available at the Maplewood Farmers’ Market.
Both white and red Japanese sweet potatoes, longer and thinner than Beauregard, will be available from Kruse Garden at Soulard Farmers’ Market (the Kruses are growing Beauregard, too). The white ones will be new to the market this fall, while the reds have been respectable sellers for three years. “White sweet potatoes will probably be a bit harder sell at the stand,” Arlene Kruse said. “It’s psychological – like yellow tomatoes are harder to sell than reds or pinks.” Kruse roasts a mix of the orange, white and red sweet potatoes with white and blue regular potatoes for a dish that’s high in flavor and off the charts for a knockout presentation. She varies flavors by using different oils and combinations – olive oil with onions and garlic, sesame oil with a dash of soy sauce, or butter with a touch of maple syrup for a slightly sweet roasted dish that caramelizes beautifully.
Soulard Market farmer Allen Hagemann is a Beauregard guy who thinks our dry summers produce the best sweets. “Melons, sweet corn and sweet potatoes only get sweeter when the weather is dry,” he said. “Last year was an excellent year for taste.” Hagemann is concerned that this year’s wet conditions could impact flavor. In addition, wet ground makes the potatoes more susceptible to disease and rot. “This year, we’ll have to wait and see,” he said.
Even if farmers have a diminished harvest, you will find plenty of interesting sweet potatoes to try. I found organic Jewell and Red Garnet varieties at both Whole Foods Market and Dierbergs. Global Foods had the prettiest roots and the most unusual selection, with the Japanese red, a stunning purple, a long white with a beautiful red skin, plus the red and orange varieties. The purple yam is noticeably dense and very sweet. Even boiled, the color remained extremely purple. Boniato, a tropical sweet potato with a deep red skin and a pale white flesh, is available at Jay International Foods. Baked, it tastes like a cross between an Idaho baker and a sweet potato – a flakier, drier texture with an earthy, sweet taste.
Testing recipes for this column has been too much fun to be called work. And the tastes – well, the sweet potato rules. For starters, I served a bed of mesclun mix topped with half-inch thick roasted rounds of Red Garnet topped with blue cheese, lemon vinaigrette and walnuts. Sweet potato slaw of grated raw potato, diced Jonathan apples, Craisins and sunflower seeds dressed with a mayo-sour cream dressing with just a bit of maple syrup really stood out. Ditto for the roasted mixed sweets, grilled corn, roasted red pepper and sausage hash. I served the hash with sweet potato biscuits and lemon pepper butter. Catfish baked with a sweet potato crust of mayonnaise, chile pepper and breadcrumbs was a crowd pleaser. I made two kinds of tea bread: One was a variation of my favorite banana bread, substituting sweet potatoes for bananas, and the other used fresh ground coriander, ginger, nutmeg, lemon and walnuts for a more savory bread. For dessert, sweet potato ice cream with maple glaze. Not a marshmallow in sight. Nobody missed them.
This article appears in Oct 1-31, 2008.