Sweet potatoes are here! Don't wait till Thanksgiving to celebrate one of earth's perfect foods

By Leslie Brenner

There’s nothing like a sweet potato, hot from the oven, simply roasted till it’s super tender and caramelized syrup oozes out of its orangey-purple skin. Slice it open, push the ends together to reveal the gorgeous, meltingly soft flesh, and send in your spoon. What a treat, that custardy bite: It’s luscious and rich, autumnal sweet chased by an earthy, mineral tang.

How many other plant-foods can you think of that are delicious and satisfying enough to be an entire meal with no added ingredients? Beans and lentils could almost be that, but impossible to enjoy them without salt. A perfectly roasted sweet potato needs no such seasoning.

Naturally, sweet potatoes are also spectacular dressed up — as in the gratin with sage-butter and thyme I love to serve for Thanksgiving.

But I’m not waiting till the holiday to indulge in sweet potatoes: This weekend I’ll roast a few of them, dress them up (or not). and swoon. From now till my favorite food holiday, there are all kinds of ways to enjoy them.

Slather with miso butter and layer on sliced scallions and furikake (Japanese seasoning mix), for something transportingly delicious. One of my very favorite autumn dishes, it makes a dreamy (meatless) dinner, either on its own, preceded by a salad or followed by a soup, or some braised lentils, creamy white beans or soupy mayocoba beans.

Miso butter, if you’re not familiar with it, is a brilliant invention: Just combine softened unsalted butter and miso in equal amounts. (White miso is ideal, but any kind will be good.) Slit open the sweet potato, and slather it on. It’s delicious just like that, or you could grind on some black pepper. Or dress it up as in this photo (and recipe).

RECIPE: Miso-Butter Sweet Potatoes

A sparkling autumn salad

Sweet potatoes are also marvelous in a fall salad, playing off another favorite autumn ingredient: pomegranate. The gem-like, tangy juicy seeds commune gorgeously with the creamy richness of the sweet potato; baby kale provides the perfect deep-flavored, earthy base and and toasted pecans add crunch. Again, great with just a soup to precede or follow it. (Roasted black bean!)

RECIPE: Baby Kale Salad with Sweet Potato

Slice and layer in a gratin

When Thanksgiving rolls around, I always make one of two sweet-potato gratins. The first was dreamed up by food writer Regina Schrambling, a frequent collaborator when I was Food Editor at The Los Angeles Times many years ago. Unlike those candied gratins so popular at holiday time, this one is savory — enriched with cream and butter and heightened with lots of fresh thyme.

RECIPE: Regina’s Savory Sweet Potato Gratin

The second savory gratin turns Regina’s version on its side — stacking the slices upright in the baking dish — and adds the classic Italian combination of brown butter and sage. It’s kind of outrageous.

RECIPE: Sweet Potato Gratin with Sage-Butter

Choose your sweet potato

Wondering what type of sweet potato to start with?

For any of these dishes (and any other I might think of), I always choose the garnet variety: Garnet sweet potatoes are exceedingly moist and sweet, not as starchy as some other varieties, and their flesh stays a saturated orange color when cooked. You’ll recognize them by their dark, purply skins. In fact, I love this variety so much I never buy any other.

Can’t commit to one of these iterations? Just go ahead and roast one plain. No recipe necessary — scrub the skin (you’ll definitely want to eat it), poke the tines of a fork in it in seven or eight places to create vents, so it doesn’t steam inside, lay it on a small baking dish or quarter-sheet pan lined with parchment and roast at 400 degrees till it’s very soft and oozing dark syrup. How long depends on the thickness of the sweet potato; a medium-sized one that’s more long and slim than fat and squat might take 45 or 50 minutes; thicker ones can take more than an hour.

Eat it piping hot, with nothing on it. Incredible how good it is, right?

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Rich, luscious and packed with umami, miso-butter sweet potatoes are a spectacular autumn treat

Roasted garnet sweet potatoes, slathered with miso butter and dressed with scallions and furikake

Miso butter is one of those magical ingredients. Creamy and luscious, rich with umami, it puts richness and incredible flavor anywhere you want it, turning the simplest foods into incredible luxuries.

It’s stunningly easy to make: Combine equal amounts of miso with softened unsalted butter. That’s it.

You can use it in a hundred different ways. Plop it on plastic film, roll in a log and chill it (as you would any compound butter), then use slices as needed to melt atop steaks or chops or steamed, braised or roasted vegetables. (Braised kale! Roasted eggplant! Roasted Brussels sprouts!) Stir it into boiled soba noodles or brown rice. Spread it on salmon fillets or chicken breasts before roasting or broiling. 

The most delicious way to use it, as far as we’re concerned, is slathering it on a hot-from-the-oven sweet potato that’s been roasted till creamy-soft, luscious and caramelized. Three ingredients: butter, miso, sweet potato. Infinite autumnal pleasure, essential winter joy. Sure, it’s a bit indulgent, with all that butter, but it’s so good. And it’s a meal in itself. Sometimes I grind black pepper on top.

Last night, I got a little fancier, skipping the black pepper and adding sliced scallions and a sprinkle of furikake — the Japanese condiment of sesame seeds and nori flakes that has become one of my pandemic pantry essentials. A dash of shichimi togarashi (Japanese red pepper flakes in a tiny shaker bottle) added a happy high note. I didn’t realize it while it was happening, but the furikake-togarashi play was inspired by a José Andrés recipe for Miso-Butter Corn.

You don’t really need a recipe for this, but maybe you’d like one. The pleasure’s all mine. And now yours.

RECIPE: Miso-Butter Sweet Potatoes

One of our 5 (five!) fabulous potato salads is sure to make your Fourth phenomenal

Our ‘Best Potato Salad Ever’

My family has put me on a potato salad time-out.

That’s because I’ve made so much potato salad during The Great Confinement that we’ve each gained about 9,000 pounds. OK, I’m kidding — but it’s surprising we haven’t, considering the carbo count these past few months.

In more normal times, I try to avoid potatoes in favor of lower-carb vegetables — and when I eat them, they’re a rare treat (like sweets for some people). But in confinement, I’ve given myself license to eat them at will. After all, they’re so delicious. And comforting. And affordable. And available. You get my drift. If ever we deserved to indulge in a potato fancy, it’s now!

Plus, it’s great to have potato in the fridge. We have to cook every night, and it goes with most everything. It’s great with a work-at-home lunch. And it can even be a dazzling little stand-in for boiled potatoes in a main-course niçoise salad.

It’s been so omnipresent in our kitchen these months that one day we’ll probably describe something that’s everywhere as “ubiquitous as potato salad in a pandemic.”

Herb-Happy Potato Salad

Potato salad is an ideal vehicle for a garden’s-worth of herbs, as in the Herb-Happy Potato above. With its vinaigrette dressing, this is the sole vegan entry in our bunch; it’s also gluten-free.

An old-fashioned one, such as Toni Tipton-Martin’s from her Jubilee cookbook, can take you all the way back to childhood. (Both are super-quick and easy to make.)

I love the Jubilee one because it’s rich in hard-boiled eggs, whose yolks blend lusciously into the mayo-based dressing, there’s a hint of sweet pickle relish and a nice celery crunch. If you’re going all-American classic with your July 4 menu, this is the one for you.

On the other hand, if you want to play it a little more exotic, consider a Japanese potato salad — we have two to choose from. One is from Sonoko Sakai’s Japanese Home Cooking (which we recently reviewed); the other is the one chef Justin Holt serves at his Dallas ramen hot-spot, Salaryman. (And that one sports a prize on top: halved ajitama marinated eggs — like the ones you find garnishing bowls of ramen.)

Each serving of Salaryman Potato salad is topped with half an ajitmama marinated egg.

Oh, man — I’m getting a starch high just revisiting them in my brain!

Finally, there is the one that predates the other four on Cooks Without Borders — the one we named Best Potato Salad Ever before we knew there’d be such heavy competition.

That’s Wylie holding a batch of it, before he and Thierry put me on potato salad time-out.

What makes it so good? It gets a luxurious richness from soft-boiled eggs, delightful tang from cornichons and shallots and lift from an array of herbs, all in the form of a New-Wave Gribiche.

I think any one of the fiHve would be a welcome guest at your picnic or party tomorrow. You can make them ahead, or not. Oh, and by the way, they’re all easy-going — in case you want to swap potato types, or swap shallots for scallions, and so forth. Whichever you choose, enjoy. I’ll be jealous.

Happy Fourth!

[RECIPE: Herb-Happy Potato Salad]

[RECIPE: Jubilee Country-Style Potato Salad]

[RECIPE: Salaryman Potato Salad]

[RECIPE: Sonoko Sakai’s Potato Salada]

[RECIPE: Best Potato Salad Ever]

My favorite roasted potatoes

I have to ask you to forgive me. I've been so busy putting together Palate, The Dallas Morning News' annual food and wine magazine, that I have been a delinquent blogger.

I promise I will make it up to you: I have a couple of really cool stories in the works. One will feature a guest cook I'm really excited to introduce you to – Susie Bui – who stopped by the house a couple weeks ago to show me how to make one of her favorite Vietnamese dishes. The other is a Japanese story I've been working on for some weeks.

In the meantime, I have this for you: my family's favorite roasted potatoes. They're super easy to make and incredibly delicious. I would even say crazy good. I don't know who invented them, but I think it must have been my dad, who was a wonderful natural cook (he picked up the habit later in life). My brothers and I all make them. Or maybe it was my mom; I don't really know, but I'm calling them Brenner Family Roasted Potatoes. My parents divorced when I was a teenager, and these potatoes were staples in both of their houses ever after.

The secret is letting the oven do all the work for you: Roasting gives the potatoes a deep, rich flavor and a wonderful texture – creamy soft inside and sort of chewy and crisp on the edges. And the roasted onion, which falls into petals when you cut it up through the stem end, melts into fabulous sweetness. If I could eat these potatoes once a week, I would. 

Before roasting, I toss them with lots of fresh thyme, but you can just as easily use rosemary – or both together. And of course a little olive oil, salt and pepper. That's it. They make a great side dish for just about any fish, fowl or meat. I love them with roasted branzino (and that makes an easy dinner for which you don't even need to turn on the stove), or roasted chicken, or sautéed pork chops – your imagination is the limit. 

Do you like the platter up at the top of the post? It's one of my favorites – an early piece by my old friend Christopher Russell, who has since become a well-known ceramist and sculptor. (Check out his website – I think his work is gorgeous.)

But often I roast the potatoes in a pretty oven-to-table roaster, and serve them straight from the oven. 

So. Thank you for being so patient. Here is the recipe:

And I promise: More good stuff coming soon.

Congratulations: You have found the Brussels sprouts recipe of your dreams

It's a Brussels sprouts world; we just live in it. 

Did you hate them once upon a time? It's understandable: In olden days (like 10 years ago), people would boil those little orbs, so biting into one was like eating a small head of boiled cabbage. Ugh.

No more. Now we now that you can roast 'em or sauté them, and they're delicious. My favorite Brussels sprouts dish involves pulling off every leaf, then slicing the centers, and sautéing it all with mirepoix and pancetta. Very delicious, and very labor-intensive.

This recipe is almost as wonderful – and 9 billion times easier. It's a no-brainer. You can cook this with your eyes closed. You can make it ahead, and serve it later, reheated. Or serve it right away. Or serve it room temp. 

All you do is this. Cut the Brussels sprouts in half or quarters, depending on their size. Toss them on a baking sheet with a little olive oil and diced pancetta. You can even cheat and buy the pancetta already diced, at Trader Joe's. I won't tell anybody.  My little brother Johnny, an ex-chef, taught me that trick. If Johnny says it's okay, it's okay. 

Want to make a vegan version? Just leave out the pancetta and add about a quarter teaspoon of salt.

Roast the sprouts in a hot oven for 25 minutes. Boom, that's it. You're done. You're ready to eat – with whatever gorgeous roast or braise or take-out you've dreamed up. Vegan or not, here we come.

Be sure to drop us a comment and tell us how you liked it.