The Sweet Potato Project: Part 3

When one encounters a hard-to-find ingredient, deciding how to cook it is no small task. The wrong seasoning, the wrong method, and all the hours you’ve spent tracking down that foraged truffle, wild boar, pomelo—or in my case, purple Hawaiian sweet potato—is for naught.

Luckily, I’m not a half-bad cook, and neither is Amy Traverso. So after splitting up our box of ‘taters—two pounds, or two very large potatoes, each—we pondered their fate.

Ultimately, we ended up taking two very different tacks. I had planned to simply boil and whip them with butter, cream, and kosher salt…until discovering that all the cream in my fridge had gone bad. (Unsurprising, given my five-night-a-week restaurant habit of late.)

I did have a can of Chaokoh coconut milk on hand, however (my Vietnamese mom’s favorite brand), which I substituted for the cream. It ended up being a nice shout-out to the potatoes’ tropical origin. Above, a photo of the finished potatoes, looking scarily like Play-Doh but actually quite tasty, topped with seared jerk-spiced scallops. All in all, a lovely date-night meal.

Now I’ll just have to try Ken Oringer’s version of the purple spuds. For better or worse, there’s no blood, sweat, or FedEx postage involved in getting it.

Next post…Amy’s purple sweet potato slices with lime butter…