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Dessert

Hawaiian Sweet Potatoes

A baked sweet potato dish with coconut juice, milk, salt, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sweet potato and coconut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 159 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Hawaiian Sweet Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

Mix

  1. In a bowl, mix the grated sweet potato with the milk and coconut juice.

  2. Add the salt and sugar, and stir until combined.

Bake

  1. Transfer the mixture to a baking dish and bake for 2 to 3 hours.

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 + coconuttop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together159 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Milk + coconuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,648 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sweet potato + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together596 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  4. Sweet potato + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,151 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sweet potato
Forms the body of the pudding, giving it starchy, tender bulk as it bakes.
Milk
Adds moisture and richness, helping the mixture set softly in the oven.
Coconut juice
Contributes liquid and a mild coconut flavor that suits the sweet potato.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the surface brown slightly during long baking.

The step that matters

Long, low baking. Baking at a low temperature for 2 to 3 hours lets the starch in the sweet potato soften fully and the liquid evaporate gradually, so the texture becomes dense and tender rather than watery or dry.

Swap the sweet potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, coconut, sugar):

  1. Sweet potatothe original
  2. Capsicumfits about as well
  3. Arrowrootfits less well
  4. Potatofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, coconut, sugar. 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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