Baked Sweet Potatoes, Lone Star Steakhouse Style

The Thai sweet potato soup of a couple of days ago was a success in every other way, but its washed-out colour went on nagging at me. I got to a just about tolerable result by colouring the finished soup with a tablespoon of turmeric, but the shade I ended up with was a long way from the intense orange I had grown used to in America. Turmeric dyes things yellow, and in Friday's picture the soup is in fact closer to the colour of mustard.

In America the sweet potato in the shops was always the soft, orange sort, and people there often called it a yam, although I am told the true yam is a different plant altogether. Friday's pale sweet potatoes came from the K-Supermarket and were grown in the USA as well, so evidently the country of origin tells you nothing about the colour. The Israeli sweet potatoes I cooked today I bought at Sesto. Here is the result, without further ado.

The soup is made to the same recipe as on Friday, and now it is the colour it should be. While the sweet potatoes were in the oven I chopped the other ingredients for the soup onto a plate, each in a heap of its own. Out of the oven the sweet potato was carrot-orange under its skin, and no wonder, since the colour is the same beta-carotene as in a carrot. On the surface there were darker patches where the sugar had had time to caramelise. Colour was not the only difference between the sweet potatoes. The Israeli ones were also much juicier, less fibrous and considerably easier to peel. Apparently that was no accident, as the pale varieties are said to be drier and less sweet than the orange ones in general.

These would make an excellent companion to a steak as "baked potatoes", or in American, Lone Star Steakhouse Baked Sweet Potatoes. The Lone Star State is Texas, and the steakhouse chain named after it brings the sweet potato to the table beside the steak with butter and cinnamon sugar. The combination sounds like a pudding. Then again, next week we Finns will be putting swede casserole sweetened with syrup beside the Christmas ham, and to Americans a sugared sweet potato with the main course is just as familiar. At Thanksgiving they go one better and top their sweet potatoes with marshmallows.

The sweet potatoes are baked whole in their skins at 200 degrees for about an hour, until a skewer pushed into the thickest part goes through without resistance. A sheet of baking parchment goes on the oven rack, because sweet drops ooze through the skin during baking and caramelise on the surface of the sweet potato and on the paper. The drops are only a good sign, for I read somewhere that in the oven part of the starch in a sweet potato has time to break down into sugar. The skin of the cooked sweet potato is slit open, a generous knob of butter is put into the gap, and cinnamon sugar is sprinkled on top without holding back. The melted butter and cinnamon sugar are stirred into the soft inside with a teaspoon.

Thanks for this taste experience go to Texas, to Lone Star Steakhouse. It was good, and the bigger the steak the baked sweet potato comes with, the better it gets!