Mashed sweet potatoes with chipotle chiles

Growing up, not a holiday dinner or church potluck supper was complete without a casserole dish filled with baked sweet potatoes topped with marshmallows. If you’ve never seen this dish, let me tell you—it looks bizarre.

Perhaps it’s the lurid color or perhaps it’s because the pairing with a dessert item with a savory item (sweet descriptor notwithstanding), though I feel the main reason why I’m not a fan is that I don’t typically like marshmallows. (Though I will eat homemade marshmallows. I am full of contradictions.)

To wit: when we’d go to Luby’s, while my family dug into slices of chess pie for dessert, I’d be eating cornbread) and seeing this large baking dish filled with a brown and orange oozing substance covered with white dots never seemed appealing.

It looked like really bad 1970’s interior design. It wasn’t dessert, either–it was considered a savory side. So I grew up thinking that sweet potatoes had to be served with marshmallows, and I never tried them.

But now that I’ve acquired a more adventurous palate, I’ve learned that sans marshmallows, sweet potatoes are extremely healthy, as they are packed with vitamin A, vitamin C, fiber, iron, and calcium. They’re also quite versatile and delicious, and can appear in a host of different recipes, both savory and sweet. For instance, they are good in everything from salad to cheesecake.

A lot of places market them as yams, but the two are not the same. While sweet potatoes are a native American vegetable, yams hail from Africa and Asia. Even more interesting is that while the sweet potato is a distant relative of regular potatoes, its relation to yams is even more removed. So why do people confuse the two? I reckon because they’re both orange on the inside.

On a recent trip to the market, I saw a ton of sweet potatoes and I was thrilled to see some of the varieties on hand—there was one bigger than my head! And there are so many ways you can cook them.

For example, you can fry them like French fries, you can bake them in a pie, you can make sweet potato soup, you can stuff them in dumplings or pasta, you can make sweet potato hash, you can bake sweet potato bread—basically, anything you can do with a potato you can do with a sweet potato.

One of my favorite things to do with them is make a sweet-potato mash flavored with chipotle peppers. It’s been a holiday hit with my family for years, so much, in fact, they stopped making the horrible sweet potatoes with marshmallows.

Now that’s progress! But even better is how healthy this dish is: because sweet potatoes are so naturally moist, you don’t need to pour in milk to make the dish creamy—it’s just the sweet potatoes and the peppers. Though if I’m feeling fancy, I’ll also add a few pats of butter for some extra richness and flavor.

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5 from 1 vote

Mashed sweet potatoes with chipotle chiles

Servings 8
Author Lisa Fain

Ingredients

  • 4 sweet potatoes
  • 1 or 2 chipotle chile peppers in adobo sauce
  • 4 tablespoons unsalted butter
  • 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

Instructions

  • Preheat oven to 375°F and line a baking sheet with foil.
  • Prick the sweet potatoes all over with a fork, place on the sheet and bake for 1 hour and 15 minutes. Remove from the oven and let them cool for 15 minutes.
  • Once the sweet potatoes have cooled, slice in half, and scoop out the orange flesh into a bowl. Mash with a potato masher or a fork.
  • Finely chop the chipotle chiles, and stir into the mashed sweet potatoes along the butter and salt. When well combined, taste and add more salt if desired. Serve warm.

Notes

This is 1 or 2 peppers (depending on how hot you want it), not full cans! 

This post was originally published in 2006 and was updated in 2022.

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30 Comments

  1. Sun2Dance says:

    My southern grandmother used to make a mashed sweet potato mixture. Mix 2 eggs, tsp vanilla, 1/2 stick butter, 1 c. coconut, some raisins and chopped pecans. Blend, bake in a casserole dish w/topping: brown sugar, pecans, and butter. Yummmm

  2. No marshmallows on my sweet potatoes and I was born in Texas. I'm more of a purist. I bake the potatoes, skin them, but them up and put them in a casserole dish. I make a syrup of brown sugar, butter and water and poor of the top and bake in the oven. They are wonderful. Marshmallows just take away from the wonderful taste of the sweet potato!

  3. Anonymous says:

    I'm a sweet potato purist… Keep those nasty marshmallows far from them! I love them just baked with a little butter on them, or fried and sprinkled with a bit of salt. Sweet potato pie is one of God's perfect foods, and I have converted many a Yankee to sweet potato lovers after one taste of my grandmothers pie recipe.

  4. Thank goodness you are helping to stamp out that nasty habit of putting marshmallows on otherwise perfectly good sweet potatoes. I'm partial to the sweet potato casserole with the crunchy topping of pecans and more sugar. I also like them sliced and baked with just butter and sugar. Leftovers are crazy good just lightly fried in a little more butter. There's no such thing as too much butter, but marshmallows are a travesty. My dad liked them, so one time only, I made them by cooking the sweet potatoes, pureeing them while hot with marshmallows and butter, allowing them to chill, them making croquettes of them, coating with crushed corn flakes and deep frying them. Not bad at all, actually. My dad thought I was a genius. I was pleased, as that was part of his last Christmas meal.

  5. So, I know this is a really old post, but I have to comment anyway. I remember the marshmallow topped casserole showing up at some potlucks at one church I went to, but my family hated that one. The most common sweet potato casserole I ever saw at all the other potlucks and at my own family's holiday meals was topped with a crumbly pecan and brown sugar mixture. It was more like dessert than a side for turkey, but tasted amazing with cranberry sauce and gravy. How is the marshmallow thing at all popular?