Why it works: Sweet potato and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,491 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓
Fried Sweet Potatoes
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Parboil the sweet potatoes until slightly tender.
Peel the potatoes and cut them lengthwise into slices.
Fry
Heat lard or butter in a pan until boiling.
Fry the potato slices in the boiling lard until golden brown.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.
Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it
Explore the science
The flavor team
The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.
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Sweet potato + buttertop 20% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together1,491 recipes
Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Sweet potatoes
- Starchy body that softens when parboiled and browns to a golden crust when fried.
- Lard or butter
- Fat that conducts heat for frying and promotes browning on the potato surface.
The step that matters
Parboil until slightly tender only. Parboiling partly cooks the starch so the inside becomes tender while frying browns the outside. Overcooking makes slices fall apart and absorb excess fat.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
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