Sweet Potato Pie

I'm the pie maker for our family's Thanksgiving at my in-law's house. Each year I bring two pies. This year I made an apple pie, and a sweet potato pie from homegrown sweet potatoes.

It was a good opportunity to use up the Garnet sweet potatoes that had split (like the one in the picture) or been damaged during harvest (a few of them got broken in half or stabbed with the digging fork). The damaged sweet potatoes weren't going to last very long in storage and needed to be used up soon. I ended up having enough damaged Garnets to get the 2 cups mashed sweet potato needed for the pie. I considered using the Molokai purple sweet potatoes, but decided to save those for something else. I wasn't sure how a purple sweet potato pie would look.

One of my sweet potatoes was a bit confused about whether it was an orange or purple sweet potato, but once I had them cooked and mashed up, the purple streaks didn't show. I cooked the sweet potatoes in the microwave and then mashed them with a fork.

Sweet potato pie is similar to pumpkin pie, but not exactly. Sweet potatoes have a denser texture than pumpkin, with more starch. I used a recipe from my Better Homes and Gardens red and white checkered cookbook, so I'm not sure if it's legal for me to reprint it here.

One difference from a pumpkin pie is it used a prebaked pie crust, which I made myself. With pumpkin pies, you use a raw crust, and the crust and filling cook together. It also needed 3 eggs, while a pumpkin pie needs 4 (maybe because sweet potatoes are denser) and a cup of buttermilk. The buttermilk seemed weird, but it gave the pie a nice tangy flavor. The spices were allspice and nutmeg. No cinnamon or ginger like pumpkin pie.

The recipe also called for only half a cup of sugar. It probably depends on how sweet your sweet potatoes are to begin with, and I was afraid mine weren't sweet enough, so I increased the sugar to 3/4 a cup. I'm glad I did too, because the pie still ended up being not especially sweet and probably could have been OK with a full cup of sugar. It was fine the way it was, though, and probably healthier than a sweeter dessert. Next time I think I'll use brown sugar instead of white.

And here is the finished pie. A lot of the time my pumpkin pies end up too soft and the slices don't stay together, but we had no problem with this pie holding together because of the density of the sweet potatoes. It looked like a pumpkin pie but had a distinctly different flavor because of the different spices and buttermilk.

Oh, and of course it was served with plenty of whipped cream.

The only problem I think needs improvement is the pie filling was a little bit lumpy. Next time I'm going to try mashing the sweet potatoes in the food processor or stand mixer to get a perfectly smooth puree.

But overall both pies were a big hit, judging by how we only had one piece leftover from each for us to take home.