I just love the color of these.
Sweet potato is a vegetable that always brings back memories of holidays in my grandparents’ village in Rajasthan. If I remember the process right – Biji, my maternal grandmother, would leave whole sweet potatoes (shakarkandi in Hindi) in the coal/wood-fired angeethi in her kitchen overnight, and the dying but still hot embers would cook it to perfection by the next morning. I remember we’d eat them straight out of the angeethi, without adding anything and I just loved that smoky, sweet taste. Which is why I never did take to the chaat that many people, including my mother, make with this vegetable since it involves adding lime juice to the cooked cubes of sweet potato. That spoils the natural sweetness of the vegetable, IMO.
But ever since I ate baked parsnip chips at a school mums’ lunch once, and baked sweet potato fingers at Jenny’s some months ago, I have been thinking I ought to try and bake sweet potato too, since I discovered that this way of cooking also brings out the vegetable’s wonderful taste and sweetness.
I had been forgetting to get around to it though so Shri – he loves those old-style roasted sweet potatoes too – decided,I guess, to take matters in to his own hands and bagged a couple of sweet potatoes one day some weeks ago when he was shopping with me, saying “these are for roasting/baking”
Well I am glad he did – these chips were yummy 🙂
Sweet Potato Chips
2 sweet potatoes
2 tablespoons of sunflower oil
some sea salt to taste
Peel the sweet potato and cut in to 5 cm thick slices. Sprinkle the salt on these and leave for 5 minutes. In the meanehile heat the oven to 22o degreesC. Now add the oil to the sweet potato slices, toss well, spread in a single layer on a baking tray and cook at the top of the oven till they are soft (they will cook quicker than regular potato chips). Turn over once, halfway through cooking.
Really nice, loads of natural flavor. We had them with steamed salmon and olive bread.
An Indian Kitchen in France 