This recipe for bourbon sweet potatoes drowns the potatoes in butter, brown sugar, bourbon, and maple syrup. A great Thanksgiving side. Best of all? It’s only 279 calories!
Bourbon sweet potatoes? Believe it. The boozy side dish everyone at your table is going to be clamoring for is pretty much diametrically opposed to that sweet and innocent marshmallow-topped sweet potato casserole of your childhood. And we love both for very different reasons even though they share the common trait of copious amounts of butter and sugar. In the words of author Virginia Willis, “Only a Southerner, inheritor of the infamous Southern sweet tooth, would add massive quantities of butter and sugar to a sweet potatoes and still regard it as a vegetable.” All we can say is these are our kind of vegetables. Originally published November 14, 2011.–Renee Schettler Rossi
Bourbon Sweet Potatoes
Ingredients
- 4 to 6 sweet potatoes, peeled and sliced into 1/2-inch (12-mm) thick rounds
- Coarse salt and freshly ground black pepper
- 1/2 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
- 4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) unsalted butter (2 oz), plus more for the baking dish
- 1/2 cup bourbon
- 2 tablespoons sorghum or maple syrup
Directions
- 1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (176°C). Butter an ovenproof gratin or casserole dish.
- 2. Arrange the sweet potato slices in the prepared baking dish and season generously with salt and pepper.
- 3. In a large saucepan, combine the sugar, butter, bourbon, and syrup and bring the mixture to a boil over medium-high heat. As soon as the sauce begins to boil, pour it over the sweet potatoes.
- 4. Bake the casserole, turning the sweet potatoes and spooning the liquid over the top occasionally, until the sweet potatoes are tender, 45 to 60 minutes. Taste and adjust for seasoning with salt and pepper.
Recipe Testers Reviews
Sweet potato yummy heaven! Make this for Thanksgiving, Superbowl Sunday, and every other fall/winter special occasion!
Anyone that makes this will tell you it was a treat just to open up the oven and smell this baking. Its wonderful goodness reaches you even before you take that first bite. The flavor that takes this to the top is the bourbon. It brings this dish together. All I can say that any extras you may want to add will be an added bonus. I was tempted to add pecans. These are pretty sweet, so they will be perfect for Thanksgiving, This is the second recipe I tested by Virginia Willis from her cookbook Bon Appetit Y’All. A favorite saying down here in Louisiana. I will use her cookbook a lot more and am happy to own it.
If you like to justify what you eat, this could be called a vegetable side dish. However, this could just as easily be called dessert. The sweet potatoes come out tender, while the sauce becomes a rich, buttery glaze. It is so simple to make, it really doesn’t matter whether you eat it for dinner, dessert, or even breakfast (my husband said it reminded him of French toast). I will be making it again.
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Anna Scott
Bourbon! Sweet potatoes! Need I say more? I’ve been pleased with all of Virginia Willis’s recipes from this great cookbook, but this one really turned heads…and noses. The smell of sweet potatoes baking in the bourbon mixture was delightful. This was a great side dish for a curry-spiced chicken and okra dish we made for some friends this weekend. This comment should tell you a lot: one of our friends who came over for dinner doesn’t even usually like sweet potatoes, but he practically rushed back over to the oven for seconds of these! In terms of the recipe itself, I made this dish in a casserole dish to try and keep the potatoes in one layer. That made it easier to baste and rotate the potatoes throughout the cooking time.My potatoes were cooked at the 45-minute mark instead of the 60-minute mark. I loved this easy recipe and would love to try it again with some pecans or walnuts sprinkled on top!