This year I have grown my first ever sweet potato patch. Because the weather this Autumn has been so warm the plants haven’t begun to die back so we are going to have a bumper crop and are harvesting as we need them. The sweet potatoes need to harden for about 10 days before using so we pick a few once a week and eat in rotation. Once the vine dies back or we get a frost the sweet potatoes need to be dug.
At lunch today I felt like indulging in hot chips (fries) so we went to dig for our potatoes. Unfortunately the bed is so overgrown with sweet potato vines that we couldn’t find any of the potatoes that were planted early in the season but we did find a lot of sweet potatoes growing off the runners. So it had to be sweet potato fries for lunch. A Google search showed that people didn’t have much success getting crisp sweet potatoes so therein lies the challenge.
The sweet potatoes are steamed, dried, coated with seasoned cornflour then deep fried until crispy. They are beautifully crisp but need to be eaten fairly quickly.
Ingredients
- Sweet potatoes
- 1/2 cup cornflower
- 1 tsp paprika
- 1 tsp cayenne pepper
- 1 tsp salt
- Deep fryer
Method
Steel wool to scrub clean the sweet potatoes
1.Scrub the potatoes with coarse steel wool – the fastest way to clean and peel. Cut into 1 1/2 cm chips.
Steam the sweet potato
2. Steam above a pot of boiling water for 10 minutes. Remove and lay out to dry.
3. Make up the cornflour/spice mix, but leave until just before cooking to coat the sweet potatoes.
4. Heat the oil. When the oil has reached temperature quickly toss the chips in the seasoned cornflour.
Toss sweet potato in seasoned cornflour in a tub.
5. I used a large tub, sprinkled some flour on the bottom, then layered the sweet potato chips with the cornflour mix and shook and tossed the lot until they were evenly coated.
6. Cook the chips until crisp – if the temperature drops, remove the fryer basket, wait for the temperature to come back up and continue cooking. When crisp, remove, drain and serve.
7. Serve with mayonnaise and sweet chilli sauce, with some seasoned salt on the side.
Crispy, tasty sweet potato chips