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Dessert

Malted Sweet Potatoes

Malted Sweet Potatoes are baked sweet potato slices coated in malt, nut butter, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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 ↓

Malted 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 the potatoes

  1. Bake the sweet potatoes until tender.

  2. Peel and cut them into slices or desired shapes.

Coat and bake

  1. Mix malt, nut butter, and salt in a bowl.

  2. Dip the potato pieces into the mixture.

  3. Place them on oiled baking sheets.

  4. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven until nicely browned.

Serve

  1. Serve hot.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

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.

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.

  1. Sweet potato + buttertop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,491 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Sweet potato + malttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Malt + buttertop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together93 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
Form the main body of the dish, becoming soft and tender when baked.
Malt
Adds sweetness and a toasty flavour, and helps the coating brown in the oven.
Nut butter
Adds fat and richness, helping the coating cling to the potato pieces and brown evenly.

The step that matters

Bake until nicely browned. The coating needs enough oven heat to brown, since sugars in the malt caramelise and create flavour. Pulling the potatoes too early leaves them pale and under-flavoured, while too long can scorch the sugars and taste bitter.

Swap the sweet potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (malt, butter):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Sweet potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against malt, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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