I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with this orange tuber. I love it and it hates me. (Wow, what a cliché, I really must try harder with this blog…)
My friend bakes them all the time and they are delicious. When I try they seem to drip molten lava onto the bottom of my oven which I will possibly clean the weekend before we move house. No plans to relocate at the moment, I'm just trying to give you an idea of my housekeeping schedule.
The sweet potato stalagmites that litter the floor of my oven have taught me a valuable lesson, though. You can never have too much kitchen foil. (By the way, was kitchen foil much more expensive in the 70s? My mother used to get palpitations if she over-estimated the size of a roasting tray by a wasteful half-inch…she HATES watching me pull screeds and screeds out to lavishly double layer a grill pan).
Having given up on making a baked sweet potato that doesn't explode in a hail of orangey shrapnel, I now tend to cut them into wedges and roast them on the foil-lined grill tray. Toss them in olive oil first, and I have found that smoked paprika makes a sensational spicy substitute for salt.
Roast them at 180-ish if it's a fan oven, 200-ish if not, for about 35 minutes. Again, you'll maybe have to rinse them to cool if you are in a hurry.
Babybear just loves them, though. Being orange they are pretty messy, as they don't make hard chips in the traditional sense but remain pretty squashy. Oooh, I've really tempted myself with this one. We are SO having smokey sweet potato wedges tomorrow. With a salad, natch…