Sweet Potato Salad Recipe (With Video)

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Hello and welcome to Freshly Served, the healthy vegan cooking show. I’m Heather and tonight we’re going to make a sweet potato salad, sweet potatoes are one of my favorite foods and you can do this salad in different ways you can make it kind of like a potato salad with cubing the vegetables, seasoning it, put it in a bowl. You’re good to go!

Or you can do it in slices so have some thin slices of sweet potato arrange on a plate and its a little bit fancier and looks a little bit more interesting.

So what we’re gonna start with are the sweet potatoes and I’ve got the end cut off as you can see. I use the kind that is orange in the middle. These are usually called yams in store. They’re not actually yams, they are just sweet potatoes but it just helps differentiate the orange flesh from the white flesh ones.

I like the orange flesh ones, they are full of beta-carotene which is a version of vitamin A, yes it’s the same thing that’s in carrots so it helps your eye. It also helps all of your tissue in your skin and the tissues that surround your organs and such so very important to get that in there.

And it’s always a good idea to switch around things so don’t always do potatoes, try sweet potatoes. Try the different kinds, the orange and the white. They have different nutrients. I’m gonna start by peeling them and tip of the day have a bowl beside you while you work so that you can peel into it rather than the garbage and then you can ran out to the compost.

I’m just gonna peel this guys up and I’m gonna do slices. So I’ve got these guys peeled and sliced and I’m gonna put them in a pot with some salt in the water. Now were gonna boil them for a few minutes. The reason we do this is to get them to cook faster and I don’t have this pot filed with water. I just have water about half way up. There’s a little bit of salt in there like I said to help them cook, I’m gonna put the lid on to keep the heat in.

And for those of you that are concern about boiling vegetables. Yes! Some nutrients will leach into the water the main nutrient in sweet potatoes is vitamin A the beta-carotene which is not water soluble, its fat soluble so you’re not gonna lose a whole lot of that and also I mean nutrients are gonna be lost no matter how you heat a vegetable and sweet potatoes has to be heated in some way.

So what I’m gonna do is boil this for about 10-15 minutes until they’re just starting to soften and then I’m going to finish them off and you can either fry or bake them after this.

Alright! So once these sweet potatoes have the chance to soften just a bit, you’re gonna get them off the heat. What I’m gonna do is switch this pan over to the hot burner, doesn’t need to be too hot about medium then I’m going to drain the water off the sweet potatoes and all I’ll do is tip the lid and pour it off.

Now you can saved that water to use for other things if you wish because it will have nutrients that have leach out from the sweet potatoes but ok, crazy about that so then what we’re gonna do is finish off this sweet potatoes by, by just sealing some of the flavoring on the outside and I’m gonna do that in my pan here.

You can just easily do this by baking them, it’ll just take a little bit longer for that flavor to seal around the outside of the sweet potato. So for baking what I will do is I would drizzle a bit of olive oil right on to these sweet potatoes. Toss it with the spices, get them in the baking dish, put them in the oven.

When I’m frying them what I’m gonna do is add a very small amount of oil. You really don’t need very much here because these are already mostly cook and because they’re wet from being boiled, they really don’t need much oil at all.

So what I’m gonna do is get this into my pan and then I will sprinkle the spices on top here. Now I’m using chilli powder for this coz I want a little bit of spicy kick for my salad.

I very rarely use chilli powder that comes out of a package but someone gave this to me and because I rarely use it, I never use it up so I decided that today I’m gonna start using it up.

So what I do rather than use chilli powder most of the time is I make my own by mixing a cayenne, cumin, oregano and some all spice. Black pepper is nice too. So very easy if you see a recipe that calls for a chilli powder and you don’t have any, you don’t need to go and buy them, just make your own.

And put on as much as you like, I like just to have a light testing over all my sweet potatoes so because I have a whole bunch at my pan here, they’re quite not fitting. I’m gonna have to move them around and keep adding spices as I go.

Make sure you flip them, once they brown at one side things have gotten sealed in, flip them over and seal them the other side.

Now you may notice that I’m not using salt here, I’ve used salt to cook the sweet potatoes in the water but now these are cooked. This process here is just sealing the flavors onto the sweet potatoes. I’m not actually cooking them here. Yes they’re in a pan and they’re getting heat but they’re not – the cooking process isn’t going on here so I don’t need any salt at this point.

So I’m just gonna get this and I’m gonna arrange them onto a plate, top them with tomatoes and I’ll show you the finish product.

So that potatoes are arranged here and I’m just gonna take a tomato, place it on top. If you are baking your sweet potatoes, you can very easily also put the tomatoes on while it’s baking so that they get a little bit toasted.

I really like the combo of the soft sweet potato with the fresh raw potato. I’m gonna crack a bit of black pepper on here, just for some added flavor, there’s nothing like black pepper on tomatoes.

And there you go! You have a beautiful sweet potato dish that you can use as a salad or an appetizer or you can just eat it as a meal. I hope you enjoy it, you can find the recipe at HealthyVeganRecipes.net. I’m Heather and this is Freshly Served.