Sweet Potato Hashbrowns

When you plan to eat a lot of something, it is best to have many ways to eat it, I find. I learned this the hard way a few years back when my family decided that okra and summer squash were getting tiresome in that exact same stir-fry every single day. So you pickle and can and saute and soup (if that can be a verb) and everyone eats far more of said vegetable.

This fall and winter, sweet potatoes have been the abundant vegetable. There’s the harvest from the garden, sure, but we also stocked up on sweet potatoes from our local grocery stores when they were $.15/lb. And by stocked up I mean we added a couple hundred pounds to our homegrown harvest.

So there have been roasted sweet potatoes and mashed sweet potatoes and sweet potato hash and sweet potato soup and sweet potato curry and sweet potato fries. No one has tired of them yet, but just to keep the family on their toes, I made hashbrowns with them the other day.

This is exactly how I make white potato hashbrowns, and it’s more of a method than a recipe. Just grate and fry, but a few key tips will give you real live hashbrowns instead of the piles of sticking sweet potato goo I made on my first attempt years ago.

Like most things in life, patience, I find, is key in making good hasbhrowns.

Sweet Potato Hashbrowns

Serves 8

Ingredients

• 4 Large Sweet Potatoes
• Coconut oil (this organic gallon is economical) or lard for frying
• Salt and Pepper to taste

Directions

Grate sweet potatoes using the largest holes on a box grater. Children love this task so I say let them go for it. Just give them a bit of a jump start on the task before you start preheating your skillet.

Preheat your skillet over medium heat. A 10″ cast-iron skillet works really well for this on my stove because it heats evenly over a medium-size flame.

Pile a couple of cups of grated sweet potatoes into the middle of a clean kitchen towel. Squeeze the sweet potatoes firmly over the sink or a bowl. You want to extract as much liquid as possible in order to make super crispy hashbrowns. Meanwhile, melt approximately 3 tablespoons of fat in your pan.

Add 1/4 – 1/2 cup of shredded sweet potatoes to the pan in three separate piles, as in the photo below.

Allow them to cook, undisturbed, for approximately three minutes. Now, firmly press each hashbrown down with the back of a spatula, as in the photo below.

Continue to cook for 7-10 minutes or until they are noticeably firm and drier on top with crispy edges, as in the hashbrown in the upper left corner of the photo below.

Flip and cook an additional 4-6 minutes or until they are deeply golden on both sides. Remove to a plate, season as desired, and repeat with remaining shredded sweet potatoes.

The beauty of a fancier sweet potato dish such as this is that you can pair it with very humble foods, like beans and vegetables, and no one complains. 

Neither does your budget.