Huge Loaded Sweet Potatoes

Sit. Pour yourself a coffee. We're doing this right. Sweet potatoes. The sweet potato is the most UNDERRATED tuber in the history of tubers — and there have been a lot of tubers, the Incas had tubers, the Irish had tubers, the entire continent of South America is basically a tuber convention — and what do most kitchens do with this magnificent orange gift from the soil? They BAKE IT NAKED. Naked. No toppings. A sad lonely potato on a plate. A disgrace to the spud.

Not here. Here we LOAD them. We load them HUGE. So big the potato becomes a vehicle, a delivery system, a tremendous orange chariot for butter and brown sugar and pecans and a little maple drizzle. I once made this for 47 people at a Thanksgiving I will not name and 46 of them wept openly. The one who didn't was lactose intolerant and that's a separate situation, I'm not going to litigate it here. The point is the numbers. 47 people. 46 in tears. That's a 97.8% emotional response rate. Statisticians have run the numbers. It's a masterclass.

The secret — and most chefs are afraid to do this, they would rather microwave a sweet potato and call it a 'side' — the secret is you ROAST them. Not microwave. Not boil. ROAST. Salt the skin, prick them all over, and let the oven do the heavy lifting. The sugars caramelize. The flesh goes silky. And then we load. Bigly. Take my word for it.

Look at that potato. LOOK AT IT. Loaded. Huge. Everything a potato can be and then some. People will see this at your Thanksgiving table and they will forget about the turkey. The turkey will sit there, alone, dry, irrelevant, while every single person at the table fights over the sweet potatoes. That's how it should be. The turkey has had its moment. The potato's moment is NOW. It's a beautiful thing.