Baked Sweet Potatoes Make For A Great Healthy Snack

24 Jun

Baked Sweet Potatoes Make For A Great Healthy Snack

Sweet potatoes are a healthy food that offers a lot of benefits in addition to its sweetness. It is a fairly carbohydrate-heavy food, which can make it a little bit difficult to recommend as a constant snack throughout the day, but it makes a great side dish along a protein. Plus, it offers a lot of natural sweetness without the problems that added sugars tend to create. This recipe is designed to bring out the flavor of these potatoes in order to allow them to complement another dish. Try putting sharp cheeses on top of these cuts in order to get the best flavor profile. Feta, goat cheese or cottage cheese can provide a great contrast.

Sweet potatoes don’t need to be served on Thanksgiving only. They offer a great hit of flavor wherever they can take the place of more regular potatoes. Although they are fairly high in carbohydrates, a lot of that is fiber, which means that they can work even for those on Atkins diets. If you find you like the recipe listed below, try making a sweet potato soup with a bit of lime juice and chili powder for the same flavor profile in a different form.

Ingredients:

4 medium sweet potatoes, scrubbed

Preparation:

First, heat your oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit. Scrub the sweet potatoes and pierce them with a sharp knife. Take a baking sheet and line it with foil, then place the potatoes on top of it. Bake for between 45 minutes and an hour. The exact amount of time will vary depending on how large your potatoes are. Pull the potatoes out when they are soft and oozing.

Place the potatoes on a plate and let them cool, cover it with plastic wrap and refrigerate it, then serve them cold or at room temperature. if you want them hot, you can reheat them for between 30 to 20 minutes in a 350 degree oven.

If you’d prefer these as fries, you can make the recipe as-is, but before cooling them, transfer them to a baking dish that will hold them snugly, slit the potatoes lengthwise and douse them with between one and two limes’ worth of juice. Then put them in a 350 degree oven for 20 to 30 minutes. This will create very sweet potatoes. You can’t speed this up with a microwave – the potatoes need time to bake so that their starches turn sweet.