Mashed Sweet Potatoes With Bourbon Recipe

By Richard Thomas

Sweet potatoes are one of the staples of southern cooking, but somewhere along the line mashed sweet potatoes fell off the standard track. One rarely sees them on the kitchen table or in meat-and-three joints, and more likely than not if you’ve had them, it was in a “new southern” gourmet restaurant. Yet mashed sweet potatoes should be almost as ordinary side dish as, say, mashed potatoes with herbs and the skins left on. In other words, upscale maybe, but hardly “gourmet”… unless you spike them with a little bourbon, that is.

This is one of the few whiskey recipes I have tried that absolutely calls for something narrower than whiskey in general. My experiment with scotch clashed badly, and Irish whiskey would likely do as badly, although I believe Tennessee whiskey might substitute for bourbon well enough.

Ingredients
1 lb sweet potatoes
1/4 cup brown sugar
1 tbsp molasses
1 tbsp butter
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 shots of bourbon whiskey
1/4 cup of cream
Salt
Olive oil

Wash the sweet potatoes, coat them with olive oil, and bake them at 400 F (205 C) for one hour. Remove the baked sweet potatoes and set them aside to cool.

Once cool, pull the peels off the potatoes, and put the fleshy cores into a bowl. Add the brown sugar, molasses, butter, spices, and a pinch of salt. Beat into a smooth, even mixture. Add the bourbon and the cream, and beat further until once again smooth and even. Transfer to a pot and heat back up on the stove top.