Why Casserole Your Sweet Potatoes When You Can Shingle Them?
The most divisive food decision at Thanksgiving isn’t white meat or dark meat, pecan or pumpkin, stuffing inside or outside the bird. It’s if your guests are Team Sweet Potato With That Marshmallow Topping Situation or well, not.
Here’s a couple things we should hopefully all agree on:
Sweet potatoes can skew sweet or savory.
When you put marshmallows on them, they are a dessert.
If you want to serve them as a side dish with the main course, consider a more savory approach.
Enter, shingled sweet potatoes with harissa. Putting taste aside for a second, this is a superior sweet potato aesthetic—layered discs of sweet potatoes nestled close together to create the perfect messy-chic arrangement. It looks like something that takes a long time to put together, even though the mandoline really does most of the heavy lifting. You peel the potatoes, slice on the mandoline, and then stack ‘em like coins on their side in concentric circles.
This particular recipe leans a bit spicy thanks to a mixture of harissa, olive oil, and white wine vinegar. And, the dukkah (a mixture of pistachios, sesame seeds, and fennel seeds) add a nice crunch. It’s simple, it’s flavorful, it works.
But, if you’re really feeling the Thanksgiving spirit, you could use this as a (very good, rigorously tested) template more than a must-follow. As in, shingle your sweet potatoes with whatever fat you like, plus any spice combination your heart desires—just make sure there’s enough oil to keep the potatoes from drying out in the oven. And, as the recipe instructs, check on them every 15 minutes to brush any accumulated oil in dish back onto the sweet potatoes.
When it all comes out looking toasty and impressive, you’ll forget there was ever any other way to cook them. And your guests? Well, they won’t even miss the marshmallows. Sorry, marshmallows.
Get the recipe:
Shingled Sweet Potatoes with Harissa
