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 ↓
Sweet Potatoes
Ingredients
Directions
The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.
Prepare
Boil sweet potatoes with their skins on until partially cooked.
Peel the sweet potatoes and place them in a baking dish.
Bake and serve
Bake at 400°F (200°C) until browned, basting with butter or beef drippings several times. Serve hot.
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
- Provide the starchy body and natural sweetness, and their surface caramelizes as it browns.
- Butter or beef drippings
- Add fat that carries flavor, keeps the surface moist, and helps the skin brown.
The step that matters
Boil until partially cooked only. Boiling softens the starch enough to finish in the oven, but if overcooked the potatoes turn mushy and fall apart when peeled and placed in the dish.
“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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