I made a soup once that was a combination of everything good – it was sweet, salty, spicy, and sour all at once. Since that day, those four combined flavours have been my goal for all things excellent, especially when it comes to sweet potato. Now any time I eat sweet potato I crave lime. Then I crave red pepper. And then I crave salt or soy sauce. So here all those things are, adapted from a recipe by Yotam Ottolenghi in “Plenty.” It’s just a variation on a Thai dipping sauce for springrolls or grilled meat, but use it on anything from noodles to lettuce salads if you want. And don’t forget the sweet potatoes.
Ingredients:
2 1/4 lbs sweet potatoes (about 4 large ones, or 6 small ones, but investing in a kitchen scale would be a great idea), peeled and hacked into large pieces for steaming. You can also steam them in their skins and those will peel right off, but you might burn your hands if you’re impatient. Know thyself.
Dipping Sauce
2 tbsp soy sauce or gluten-free tamari (or fish sauce)
1/2 tsp sugar or maple syrup
1 tbsp minced green onion
1/8 – 1/4 tsp minced hot red chili pepper
2 tbsp unseasoned rice wine vinegar
1 tbsp lime juice (plus extra lime slices to serve on the side)
2 tsp soy sauce or gluten-free tamari
3/4 cup all purpose or chickpea flour (the nuttiness doesn’t really come through here, so if you’re gluten-free you could also use rice flour or a gluten-free blend and it would be fine)
3/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp sugar
3 tbsp green onions, chopped
1/2 tsp finely diced fresh red chili pepper (or more, if you’re daring)
butter or oil for frying (I used Earth Balance, but you can use anything from sesame oil or sunflower oil to honest to goodness cow butter. Sounds much less appealing when you call it “cow butter,” doesn’t it?)
Optional cilantro leaves for garnish
Optional 1/4 of an avocado, sliced, for garnish
Steam sweet potatoes for 10-15 minutes (depending on size of chunks – try to make them all similar sizes so they cook in the same amount of time), until soft. Drain in a colander and leave until cool enough to handle. Then peel them if you haven’t already done so. Otherwise just let them cool so they don’t add excess liquid to the batter.
Make the dipping sauce by combining all the ingredients.
Mash sweet potatoes with the 2 tsp soy sauce (or tamari), flour, 3/4 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp sugar, 3 tbsp green onions and fresh chili pepper. The mix should be sticky – not really like batter, actually. You can add some more flour if it’s runny like pancake batter.
Heat 1 to 2 tbsp oil or butter in a large skillet over medium heat. There’s no fat in the batter so you need this fat to cook the pancakes evenly and brown them well. When hot add batter in 1 tbsp mounds to the pan. Rinse a spoon in water or coat the bottom with oil to flatten the top of the mound into a disc. It should be more than about 3/8 of an inch thick – slightly less than half an inch. Or make one big galette out of 1/4 of the batter:
Fry about 6 minutes on the first side. If the bottom gets too dark too fast, turn the heat down. Flip the pancakes and brown the other side for 6 minutes. Place on paper towels to absorb excess oil and then transfer to a baking sheet in an oven preheated to 300F to keep warm. Theoretically the pancakes should have cooked through in the skillet, but if they were too thick they may not have. This oven bit ensures they cook all the way through, AND it keeps them warm so some people aren’t eating pancakes while others are waiting. You can serve them all at the same time.
Serve with the dipping sauce on the side. It’s pungent. Especially after the chili and green onion have marinated for awhile. The sauce also keeps a few days in the fridge so use it for leftovers – anything from meat or even pasta, to more steam sweet potatoes all by themselves. Garnish with fresh cilantro leaves and/or thin slices of avocado. And don’t forget an extra lime slice or two in case you want even more acidity.
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