BETTER ROASTED SWEET
POTATOES
OK, so sweet potatoes are sweet, but they’re not that sweet,
right? I mean, sure, you could go with maple syrup or
honey and marshmallows on top, but I wouldn’t wish one of
those monstrous casseroles on my worst enemy, let alone
my own family. Much better are really well-roasted sweet
potatoes. At their best, they’re creamy, flavorful, and sweet,
with a slightly crisp, caramelized crust. Too often though,
roasted sweet potatoes end up mealy, starchy, and bland.
How can the same vegetable produce such distinctly
different results? How does one get a sweet potato to really
live up to its name?
Here’s the deal: starch is made from sugar. More
precisely, starch is a polysaccharide, which means that it’s a
large molecule consisting of many smaller sugar molecules
(in the case of sweet potatoes, glucose). The thing about
sugar, though, is that unless it’s broken down to relatively
simple forms, it doesn’t taste sweet to us. Your tongue
simply doesn’t recognize it. It helps to imagine sugar
molecules as a bunch of circus midgets (OK, “little people,”
if you will). When they’re all standing in a row, it’s easy for
us to identify them as midgets. But stack them up on one
another and throw a trench coat over ’em, and they’re
effectively hidden.
Now, sweet potatoes contain plenty of starch molecules.
The goal when roasting them is to try and break down as
many of the starch molecules as possible into sweet-tasting
maltose (a sugar consisting of two glucose molecules): pull