Sweet Potato Casserole

Howdy folks and welcome to the kitchen. Today we’re making sweet potato casserole. Our holidays are almost here so it’s time to get started with some of our holiday recipes.

Why You’ll Love This

This is a really good one to add to your list for those big family dinners maybe your potluck get-togethers at church or at work or wherever.

This casserole has a crumb topping and this is an alternative to that marshmallow top sweet potatoes it’s a little bit fancier I think it has a lot more flavor.

The nuts in it and the cinnamon and the you know it just all goes together so good and the different textures in it makes a really different side dish.

Ingredients

For the sweet potato mixture:

four cups of cooked sweet potatoes
two eggs
1/2 cup of milk
a teaspoon of vanilla
about 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon of salt
1/2 a stick of butter which is 4 tablespoons
1/2 a cup of brown sugar

For the crumb topping:

1/2 a cup of brown sugar
1/2 a cup of flour
1/2 cup of chopped pecans
about 1/2 a teaspoon of cinnamon
1/2 a teaspoon of salt
another half stick of butter 4 tablespoons

Instructions

Put our half stick butter in our warm potatoes and let that start melting.
Mash them up just about any way you want to.
Add your salt and your cinnamon and your vanilla and brown sugar.
Whisk these just a little bit.
Beat those up pretty good and put just a tiny bit of air in them.
Add that to your potato mixture and give it another mix.
Once you’ve got everything pretty well mixed up you want to put it into a buttered casserole dish.
Kind of spread it out even.
Put in our flour and our cinnamon and our salt and our sugar and kind of mix that up just a tiny bit.
Add my butter.
Kind of cut the butter in it.
Add in your pecans and kind of mix those up a little bit.
Dump this in an even layer on top of our sweet potato mixture.
Kind of spread it out a little bit.
Put this in a 350 degree oven for about 30 minutes.

Cooking Tips

Don’t boil your potatoes when you use them in recipes your sweet potatoes if you’re making the sweet potato casserole or you want to do a sweet potato pie bake them because when you cut them up peel them and cut them up and boil them that it waters them down and it dilutes the flavor they don’t have as much flavor in them so bake them.

After you’ve baked them the skins just slide right off and then you can mash them up and they have so much more flavor if you bake them than if you boil them.

You can use an electric mixer if you’d like I usually just use my whisk and mash them a little bit if you cook them getting done it’s not hard to mash them at all if you use an electric mixer though it is gonna make them fluffier and it’ll make the whole dish a little lighter the texture but that’s up to you.

You don’t have to use the eggs in this if you have somebody coming that maybe has an egg allergy what the eggs do is they’re gonna make this rise up and it’s gonna be kind of like a souffle it’s gonna have that kind of texture but it will come out just fine without the eggs it just won’t you won’t get that little bit of rise but with two eggs you’re not gonna get a huge amount of rise anyway it does change the texture a little bit it doesn’t really change the flavor.

You do want to beat those up pretty good and put just a tiny bit of air in them.

You don’t have to use a glass dish you can use a metal dish but you do want to smear a little butter in it this is a two quart dish it’s uh I think like an eight by eleven you could put this in even a nine by nine pan probably wouldn’t want to go much smaller than that though.

You do want to mix this by hand it takes just a minute and your butter can be anywhere from right out of the fridge to room temperature you don’t want it super super soft the the firmer it is the harder this is to mix and you just want to kind of cut the butter in it.

I say you don’t want to mix this with an electric mixer because you don’t want to get this so well combined that it’s a paste if you’re making a crumb topping for something and you over mix it and turn it into a paste what it’s going to give you is a hard topping a solid hard topping it’s not going to give you that crisp crumbly topping that you’re looking for and a crumb topping so it’s important that you get it to a combined well your butter all cut up in it good but you want it like a sand consistency not a paste.

This is the most time consuming part of the whole process if you bake your potatoes even peeling the potatoes only takes a second and you don’t have to cut them up or anything like that like you do if you boil them.

If you’ve got some tiny pieces of butter left in there those are going to cook up and make little crispy pieces around them but you don’t want anything real big you want it you know kind of like sand.

How long it takes to bake is going to be determined by a few things like number one if you got to make a really big one if you’re feeding a whole bunch of people it’s going to take longer to bake if your sweet potatoes have cooled down before you get it in the oven it’s going to take longer to bake if they’re still really hot when you put it in the oven like if you’ve got your crumb topping already made before your sweet potatoes are baking or something and you mash them up and put them in there real quick it’s going to bake a lot faster but about 30 minutes just at that point you want to keep an eye on it if your potatoes are really really hot you might want to start checking it at about 25 minutes.

350 degrees about 30 minutes.

You can make this mix it up the day before thanksgiving and then bake it on thanksgiving day so that you’re not doing so much on thanksgiving day.

If you do the baked potatoes instead of the boiled potatoes yours is going to be the best and everybody’s going to want your recipe.

Serving Suggestions

This recipe for Thanksgiving would probably do about eight people but if you’re gonna do it just for a Sunday dinner and have it like with baked chicken or a ham or something and it’s gonna be one of the main sides you might want to cut that back to about six people.

If you’re looking for a different side dish for a sunday dinner this is great.

If you’re looking for something to take to a potluck get together around thanksgiving or christmas this is a really good option.

If the kids are old enough that you don’t have to put marshmallows on your sweet potatoes to get them to eat them this is a really good option.

Thank you all so much for joining us in the kitchen. Until next time remember to put god first.