Home › Thanksgiving Dinners › Grilled Sweet Potatoes
Grilled Sweet Potatoes
Slice previously cooked sweet potatoes lengthwise. Place in shallow pan, season with salt, pepper, and melted butter and grill under broiler until browned.
A two-line side dish that assumes you already have boiled or baked sweet potatoes on hand, which on Thanksgiving morning was a safe assumption. The details it leaves out are all about thickness, fat and distance from the flame.
- Start with cold cooked potatoesBoil or bake the sweet potatoes ahead and let them cool. Cold, firm flesh slices more cleanly into planks; warm flesh is soft and harder to cut neatly.
- Cut thicknessLengthwise slabs of about 1/2 inch brown well without drying out. Thinner than 1/4 inch and the edges scorch before the surface takes color.
- "Grill under broiler"In this period grilling meant broiling, not an outdoor fire. Preheat the broiler fully and set the rack so the potatoes sit 4 to 5 inches below the element.
- Butter generously and re-basteSweet potato is low in fat and browns by way of the butter, not its own juices. Brush the tops, then brush again when you turn the slices, or they will dry rather than glaze.
- TimingRoughly 4 to 6 minutes a side under a hot broiler. Sugar in the flesh means they go from browned to burnt quickly, so watch them rather than trusting a clock.
- Pan choiceA shallow metal pan or rimmed sheet, not glass, which is not made for broiler heat. Line it with foil if you want to spare yourself the caramelized sugar.
- YieldTwo medium sweet potatoes will give roughly four servings. They can be sliced and seasoned ahead and broiled at the last minute.
Sweet potatoes have long been associated with the American Thanksgiving table, usually candied, mashed with sugar, or baked into a pudding. What is notable here is the restraint: salt, pepper, butter and heat, with no brown sugar, marshmallow or syrup anywhere. That plainness is in keeping with the streamlined style of cooking promoted in American kitchens in the interwar decades, when the range's broiler compartment was a selling point and cookbooks were keen to show what it could do. Broiling a side dish under the flame also leaves the oven free, which may be part of the appeal.