Give Your Roasted Sweet Potatoes A Spicy-Sweet Flair With This Easy Swap

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.

When the weather gets chilly, it's a good time to turn on the oven and cook your favorite root vegetables. There's no better way to warm up than with a soothing batch of roasted sweet potatoes, particularly if you've taken care to sauce and season them in a way that complements their natural flavor. If you want to turn up the heat on an already comforting dish, substitute hot honey for the standard version in our honey-roasted sweet potatoes recipe from Tasting Table recipe developer Hayley MacLean.

This easy ingredient upgrade will do wonders for your meal, providing the right balance between sweetness and heat to deepen the complexity of your sweet potatoes. The honey in this recipe is mixed with olive oil, lemon juice, salt, pepper, and cinnamon and used as a sort of marinade for the sweet potatoes before oven-roasting. As such, the hot honey swap can be made at an approximately 1:1 ratio, allowing the element of spice to effectively play off of the ground cinnamon and black pepper.

Mike's Hot Honey or any other popular hot honey brands are typically made using either fresh or dried chilies, creating a sort of spicy spin on regular sweet honey. This blend of spice and sweetness opens up new possibilities for other ingredient additions and swaps.

If you choose to make your own hot honey for more control over the spice, it will allow you to try different variations on the combination of sweetness and spice. For example, mix Calabrian chili paste or crushed red pepper flakes into your preferred type of honey before using it in the marinade for your sweet potatoes. You can also try using Gojuchang for a more robust flavor.

Other options to amp up the flavor of your spicy sweet potatoes include varying the style of pepper you use. Load up a grinder with Sichuan peppercorns, pink peppercorns, or tricolor peppercorns for a stronger seasoning to complement the hot honey in your sweet potato marinade. Try including earthy herbs like sage or thyme to balance out the heat and sweetness of your roasted dish.

You can also try adding other coordinating warming spices to the marinade mixture, including nutmeg, ginger, and clove, or a dash of Chinese Five Spice to go with the cinnamon. Temper the heat of your roasted sweet potatoes by serving them alongside a dollop of sour cream or crème fraîche. Finish off your sweet potatoes by sprinkling a light layer of brown sugar over the warm tray just out of the oven.