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Baked Sweet Potatoes

Sweet potatoes baked with sugar, butter, salt, pepper, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Baked Sweet Potatoes

Why it works: Sweet potato and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,015 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Baked Sweet Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice sweet potatoes lengthwise into ½ inch thick pieces.

  2. Place in a baking pan.

Season and bake

  1. Sprinkle with sugar, butter, coarse sea salt, and black pepper.

  2. Add a little boiling water.

  3. Bake until done.

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.

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.

  1. Sweet potato + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,015 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the surface brown as it caramelises in the oven.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour and helping the potatoes brown.
Boiling water
Adds moisture so the potatoes steam and cook through without drying out.

The step that matters

Bake until done. Without a stated time or temperature, it is easy to under- or overbake. Starch in sweet potato softens fully only once it is cooked through, so test with a knife for tenderness rather than relying on colour alone.

Swap the sweet potato

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits about as well
  3. Sweet potatothe original
  4. Mustardfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, pepper. 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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