Start Making Melting Sweet Potatoes And You'll Never Want Spuds Another Way

Fried or roasted, mashed or baked. Take your favorite potato recipe, swap in sweet potatoes instead, and you usually have an instant hit on your hand. This is especially true when it comes to melting potatoes — once you try them, you'll never want to have them any other way. For those who aren't sure what melting potatoes are, it's a take on the uber-luxurious potato fondant, a dish with a crisp, caramelized exterior and a buttery smooth and soft center. When you use sweet potatoes instead of regular potatoes, you get the same contrasting textures but with a deeper, more layered flavor profile. Because sweet potatoes have more natural sugars, the caramelization process delivers an intense earthy sweetness that you don't get with regular fondant potatoes.

Melting sweet potatoes or sweet potato fondants are simple enough to make, with the basic recipe involving two steps. The first is to sear the outside of the sweet potato discs (or cubes, depending on how much time you want to spend chopping) and get them nice and crisp. This can be done in a pan or in a hot oven with some butter or oil for 10-15 minutes. The second step involves slowly infusing the sweet potato pieces with liquid and flavor through a combination of basting and baking. Baste them in a pan on the stove top in seasoned butter. This is where you can get creative, using added flavors in both your basting butter as well as the broth that it cooks in. For best results, use the Covington variety of sweet potatoes – that's the ones with the orange skin, not pale brown or purple.

Tips for making perfect fondant potatoes apply to melting sweet potatoes as well, but first let's take some inspiration from cooking a steak. Butter basting is how you get a steak nice and juicy. The process involves infusing butter with flavors like garlic and rosemary and then gently spooning it on a seared steak until the inside comes up to temperature. It always pays to butter baste your steak, and the same applies to spuds as well. You could use the classic rosemary-and-garlic combination, or experiment with flavors — add a bit of heat with some chilli paste, or stir in a spoonful of miso if you're craving an umami hit. You could even infuse your butter with truffle if you feel like eating luxury fondants.

When it comes to sweet potatoes you want the insides to get extremely soft. This means placing them in a pan with some broth and then cooking them in the oven at 500 degrees Fahrenheit for the final stage. While this easy fondant recipe uses chicken broth, you could always amp up the flavor with beef broth, or go for a boozy twist — adding white wine to your chicken stock really makes it sing. Whatever option you choose to go with, make sure your sweet potatoes cook in this liquid for at least 15 minutes, at which point your spuds should have soaked up most of it, resulting in a magically soft and flavorful center that will keep you coming back for more.