Sometimes I like to saute sliced sweet potatos with some kale for lunch when working from home. Add a little vinegar and seasoning, maybe a bit of cheese and you’re done. This meal turns out great using typical orange sweet potatos, but fails badly using purple sweet potatos – they’re too pasty and crumbly. They’re almost inedible cooked this way, but I don’t want to waste them. So what to do with the purple variety? Make them into fries.

You can deep fry them, or bake or pan-fry. Here’s how I fried them on the stove, it’s very simple:

  • Use a heavy frying pan with a thick bottom surface to distribute the heat well (really important(

Ingredients

  • 1/2 to 3/4 cup avocado oil or corn oil
  • 1 pound purple sweet potato
  • Seasoning you have or like: I used generic salt + pepper + garlic salt mix

Method:

  1. Heat the oil in the pan. It should be at least 1/4 inch deep (so don’t use a very large pan.) When you spread the slices in the pan it’s surface should be 2/3 or 3/4 covered by the slices.
  2. While heating, slice the sweet potato into slices around 1/3 inch thick, or a little thinner for faster cooking. You probably want to slice off the skin as these kind of sweet potatos can have alot of grit on the surface.
  3. Spread the slices in the hot oil and turn them to coat with oil. Be careful. Make sure the slices arent wet when you put them in the oil (they shouldn’t be unless you washed them after cutting.)
  4. Cover and fry for about 15 minutes. You probably want medium heat but this all depends on your stove and the particular burner you use. Check a couple of times to make sure they are not over cooked. They’ll end up very dark purple.
  5. Remove with a slottet spoon and season.

Notes

  • A real deep fry approach would have you submerge in oil and lift out the fries on a screen to drain the oil. But the oil-coating approach I used worked really well.

  • Baking would only require a fraction of the oil. The downside is you have to heat up your oven and your house.