sweet potato – Gastronomy Domine

21st July 2011

Roast vegetable and halloumi tart

I’ve been busy working on some new recipes while having a month off from blogging. This is a really good-looking tart, great for parties. I love working with filo pastry; it’s very forgiving (any little tears can easily be ignored as you layer new sheets on), and the crisp finish is second to none, fantastic against the softened vegetables and the bite of the halloumi.

For one 20cm tart, you’ll need:

50g pancetta
1 large white onion
1 large sweet potato
4 pointed peppers
1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves
100g halloumi
10 sheets filo pastry
25g melted butter
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 200ºC (390ºF). Toss the pancetta, the onion, diced finely, and the peeled, cubed potato in the olive oil with a large pinch of salt and some pepper. Roast for 45 minutes, stirring once halfway through the cooking time. The sweet potatoes should be turning golden-brown, and the onions should be sweet and golden. Turn the oven down to 190ºC (370ºF).

While the sweet potato mixture is roasting, cut the peppers in half and grill them, skin side up, until the skins turn black and start to blister. Seal the hot, blistered peppers in a plastic freezer bag. The steam they release will help to loosen the skins and make them easy to slip off with your fingers.

Line a loose-bottomed 20cm tart dish with filo pastry. Lay a sheet halfway across the dish and fold over any that dangles over the edge. Lay another sheet across the other half of the dish, brush them both with butter, and rotate the dish 45 degrees. Repeat the process until you have used up all ten sheets. Prick the base of the pastry a few times with a fork, and line with a circle of greaseproof paper. Fill the tart case with baking beans and bake blind for ten minutes. Remove the beans and paper.

Chop the halloumi into pieces the same size as the chunks of sweet potato, and chop the skinned peppers. Toss the halloumi, peppers and thyme with the sweet potato mixture. Spoon the filling into the tart case. Bake for another 30-40 minutes until golden. Leave to rest for 10 minutes before popping the tart out of the case and serving.

14th April 2009

Smoked salmon hash

A quick and dirty breakfast dish. This is just perfect for Sunday mornings in bed with a tray, the papers and a very good friend. This hash is all made in one pan, salty from the salmon, studded with tart capers and stickily sweet from the sweet potatoes. A good squirt of lime juice to counter that sweetness and a spoonful of herby crème fraîche – who could ask for more?

If you do plan on making this for breakfast, it’s worth chopping the potatoes and making the crème fraîche the night before so you can operate on autopilot in the morning without having to go anywhere near sharp knives.

To serve two (with some leftovers – we like leftovers round here), you’ll need:

3 large sweet potatoes (make sure these are the ones with golden flesh)
3 large shallots
250g cold-smoked salmon
1 handful chives (plus a teaspoon to garnish)
1 handful parsley (plus a teaspoon to garnish)
½ handful tarragon
200g crème fraîche
2 heaped tablespoons rinsed capers
Juice of 2 limes
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 eggs
Salt and pepper

Start by making the crème fraîche. Just stir in the chopped herbs, keeping some aside to garnish the finished dish, 1 tablespoon of the capers, 1 raw chopped shallot and the juice of a lime. Set aside in the fridge and stir before serving.

To make the hash, dice the peeled potatoes and cut the remaining shallots into slices. Fry in a large pan over a medium heat in the butter and olive oil mixture, stirring regularly, until the edges of the potato pieces are caramelising and turning a golden brown.

Check that the sweet potato is cooked through (poke with a chopstick to test for softness) and tip the salmon and remaining capers into the pan. Toss with a wooden spoon until the salmon is all opaque, then sprinkle over the juice of the remaining lime. Check for seasoning. Spoon the finished hash into serving bowls, dress with the reserved herbs, add a tablespoon of the crème fraîche and top off with a fried egg.

23rd July 2008

Sweet potato and chickpea curry

I like to make a vegetable curry as an accompaniment when I make a meat one, but this curry is substantial and tasty enough to stand up as a meal on its own with rice. This curry is in a southern Indian style, with coconut milk making the curry rich and thick, and lime juice adding zing. It’s great for vegetarians – it’s loaded with flavour, and will have the meat-eaters fighting among themselves (probably with forks) for a helping too.

I have been lazy in this recipe and haven’t made my own curry paste. A good shop-bought curry powder works very well here – as usual, I recommend Bolst’s Madras powder, which is really well-balanced and fragrant. To serve four, you’ll need:

3 sweet potatoes
2 onions
6 spring onions plus more to garnish
2 tablespoons curry powder
1 teaspoon coriander seeds
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
1 inch piece of ginger
4 cloves garlic
1 can chickpeas
1 can coconut milk
1 bird’s eye chilli (more if you want a hotter curry)
1 handful chopped coriander leaves
Juice of 1 lime
3 tablespoons oil
Salt to taste

Dice the onions and slice the spring onions, and sauté them in the oil with the curry powder and the coriander, cumin and fennel seeds until the onions are soft and translucent. Add the garlic and ginger, both chopped finely, with the diced and peeled sweet potato and the sliced chilli, and continue to sauté until the sweet potato starts to caramelise and brown a little at the edges.

Pour the coconut milk over the curry, cover and simmer for fifteen minutes, until the sweet potato is soft. Add the drained chickpeas to the pan with half the lime juice and a teaspoon of salt, and simmer for another five minutes. Taste for seasoning – you may want to add more lime. Remove from the heat and stir in the fresh coriander, and garnish with some sliced spring onion.

This curry tastes even better if you leave it in the fridge for a day before reheating and serving. If you do this, add some more fresh coriander when you serve it.

2nd June 2008

Plantain and sweet potato cake

This is a kind of rösti, which I came up with to accompany some jerked chicken. Plantains are great: they are a cousin of the banana, and look like a giant, green, yellow or creamy version of the things you eat for pudding. Unlike a banana, a plantain is usually served cooked, either when under-ripe, when they are wonderfully starchy, or overripe, when they become sweet.

You can treat an under-ripe (green) plantain much as you would a potato. I’ve teamed my plantains up with a sweet potato here for some colour and extra sweetness. The allspice here is typically Jamaican, and goes really well with the jerked chicken you’ll find on this site.

To serve 3-4 as a side dish, you’ll need:

2 large green plantains
1 large sweet potato
1 medium onion
1 ½ teaspoons ground allspice
Butter and oil to fry
Salt and pepper

Peel the plantains by chopping them in half widthways (not lengthways, as you would a banana) and easing the tough skin off. Grate the creamy flesh of the fruit. Peel and grate the sweet potato and the onion. Mix the grated sweet potato, plantain, the onion and allspice and some salt and pepper to taste in a large bowl, and melt a generous amount of oil and butter together in a large, non-stick frying pan until the butter starts to bubble.

Add the plantain and sweet potato mixture to the pan and pack it down so you have a thick pancake. Fry over a medium heat for ten minutes, then put a large plate over the pan and turn the whole arrangement upside-down, so the pancake ends up crispy side up on the plate. Return the pan to the heat, add more oil and butter and slide the pancake in, uncooked side downwards, and fry for another ten minutes. Serve piping hot.

5th December 2007

Sweet potato and halloumi sauté

Sweet potato is a great winter ingredient – all that sugar and gorgeous colour make for a really uplifting meal. The tuber is so packed with sweetness that cooking it in this way will make the edges catch and caramelise in the butter, leaving each soft little cube with a coating that’s halfway between chewy and crisp. Alongside the salty halloumi, this mixture of textures and flavours is a real winner.

This dish makes a really tasty main course for vegetarians. I also like it as a side dish with some good sausages. The magic in this is all in the spicing – it’s worth taking the time to set to the spices with a mortar and pestle until they’re really well blended (you can also use a coffee grinder) – whatever method you choose, make sure that the anise and cloves in particular are well-pulverised, because neither ingredient is good to bite down on in large chunks. You’ll end up making more spice mixture than you need, but I view this as a time-saver; just pack the extra mixture into a freezer bag and pop it in the freezer. Next time you come to cook this dish, you can use the mixture directly from the freezer.

To serve four as a side dish or two as a main course, you’ll need:

1 sweet potato
1 block halloumi
1 large shallot
1 clove garlic
1 teaspoon cumin
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
1 teaspoon flaked chillies
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon onion salt
1 ‘petal’ star anise
3 cloves
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon chopped parsley

Take the cumin, fennel seeds, chillies, cinnamon, onion salt, anise and cloves, and grind them thoroughly in a mortar and pestle or coffee grinder. Peel the sweet potato and cut it into large dice, about the size of the top joint of your thumb. Sprinkle two teaspoons of the spice mixture over the sweet potato pieces and toss well until they are coated. Cut the halloumi into dice the same size as the sweet potato pieces and dice the shallot finely.

Heat the butter in a non-stick frying pan over a medium-low heat (make sure you use a non-stick pan or this dish will stick like glue) until it starts to foam, and tip in the spiced sweet potato. Sauté gently, turning the pieces every few minutes, until the sweet potato is soft all the way through (about 20 minutes).

Turn the heat up a notch and add the shallots and a crushed clove of garlic to the pan. Stir well to distribute the shallots and garlic around the pan, then add the halloumi, making sure that all the halloumi pieces are in contact with the bottom of your pan. Cook for another five minutes without stirring, turn the halloumi pieces and continue to sauté for another five minutes. The shallots should be brown and a little gummy, and the halloumi should be seared a golden colour where it’s been in contact with the pan.

Turn out into a heated serving dish and garnish with parsley.

27th November 2007

Golden winter vegetable soup with frizzled chorizo

Soothing, sweet, buttery, winter vegetables are a real blessing when the weather’s cold. Plants keep a store of energy in the form of sugars in their tubers and roots, and those tubers and roots make for some surprisingly uplifting eating. This soup is passed through a sieve after being liquidised to ensure a silky, creamy texture. If you don’t own a food processor you can still make it – at the stage where the ingredients go into the processor bowl you can just mash them with a potato masher for about ten minutes, then pass the resulting mush through a sieve, pressing it through with the bottom of a ladle. You will end up muscular and with a very good pan of soup.

Because of all the plant sugars in these vegetables, you’ll find you need something salty to counter the sweet taste. I’ve cut chorizo into coins and fried it until it’s crisp and friable – a lovely contrast in texture with the silky, creamy soup. The result is a lovely sun-coloured dish at a time of year when the sun is a distant memory.

To serve four as a main course, you’ll need:

1 small celeriac
3 small sweet potatoes
1 small swede
1 small butternut squash
1 small onion
2 shallots
1 parsnip
3 carrots
1 leek
3 tablespoons butter
1 litre chicken stock (vegetarians can substitute vegetable stock and use croutons instead of the chorizo)
200 ml double cream
2 teaspoons salt
½ a nutmeg, grated
10 turns of the pepper mill
2 tablespoons chopped chives

Peel all the vegetables and cut them all into 1-inch chunks. Melt the butter in a large pan with a heavy base (this will help the soup cook evenly – I recommend Le Creuset pans, which are made of enamelled cast iron, and disperse heat beautifully) and sweat the vegetables, stirring regularly, until they begin to soften. You’ll find that the sweet potato pieces may brown a little. Don’t worry about it; they contain so much sugar that it’s hard to prevent a little of it caramelising, and it just gives depth to the soup.

When the vegetables are softening evenly, pour over the hot stock. It’s best if your stock is home-made, but some of the liquid stocks you can buy at the supermarket these days are a good substitute if you don’t have any in the freezer. Bring the stock and vegetables to a simmer, cover with a lid and leave for 20 minutes or until all the vegetables are soft all the way through.

While the soup simmers, slice a chorizo into pieces about the same size as a pound coin and fry over a medium flame in a dry frying pan, stirring and flipping the pieces occasionally. The chorizo will release its fat and the pieces will become crisp. After about 20 minutes, when the chorizo is crisp and dry, remove the pieces and drain on paper towels. Reserve the oil.

Transfer the vegetables and stock to a large bowl and liquidise in batches, passing each processed batch through a sieve back into the large pan. You will find you need to push the soup through the sieve with the back of a large spoon or ladle. Return the pan to a very low heat and stir in the cream, salt and pepper and the grated nutmeg. Bring to a simmer and serve with a drizzle of chorizo oil, some chorizo scattered over (keep some more in a bowl for people to help themselves) and a sprinkling of chopped chives.