

Ideas lurk everywhere. The other day I was at my son’s classmate’s house after school as the kids wanted to play and I was hanging around in the kitchen with the parents, drinking tea and chatting up. The dad was preparing an early dinner and one of the dishes was a savoury starchy bake using potatoes and sweet potatoes.
I’m not a big fan of sweet potatoes, but I’ve always loved the Tamil style sweet potato stir fry curry with sambar-rice or in desserts (yes, brownies!) or randomly in some other dishes. I find that sweet potatoes that we get here need a lot of flavour boost to taste great.
This time, I wanted to try out a savoury bake with them. I had noticed our friend preparing a kind of béchamel sauce to go on top of the layered sweet potatoes, topped with cheese.
But since we had no cheese at home, I had to improvise with something else. And that’s how the peanut crumb happened. It did provide a fantastic texture to the otherwise melty dish, not to mention upping the protein content of the dish.

Recipe for Savoury Sweet Potato Bake
Serves 3-4

Savoury sweet potato bake with a peanut crumb
Ingredients
- 2 sweet potatoes medium sized
- 1/2 cup green peas fresh or frozen
- 2 cups milk
- 1 tbsp butter
- 1.5 tbsps flour
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1 tsp rosemary dried , crushed
- 1/2 tsp nutmeg grated
- 1 - 2 tsps black pepper freshly ground
- 1/3 cup peanuts roasted , skins removed
- salted peanuts you could use ready available roasted too
Instructions
- Preheat oven at 180 C.
- In a large pan, bring 2 litres water to a boil with 1 tsp salt.
- In a mixer / food processor pulse the peanuts till coarsely crumbed.
- Meanwhile, scrub the sweet potatoes well with a scrubber and lots of water to remove all the soil. Do not peel. Finely slice them, and add them to the boiling water. Add the peas too.
- Check in 4 minutes, if they are partially cooked. If yes, drain the water in a colander and keep aside the veggies.
- In a saucepan, heat butter. Add flour and make a 'roux' until all the flour is absorbed in the butter and turns lightly aromatic. Add the milk with constant whisking. If a few lumps remain, it's okay with this dish. Add the salt, dried rosemary, pepper and nutmeg.
- Lightly grease a mid-sized baking dish. Place the partly cooked sweet potato slices and peas, gently flattening them down. Sprinkle some pepper over the top.
- Add the sauce, lightly smoothening it out with a spatula.
- Top with peanut crumbs.
- Place in the middle of the oven for 30 minutes or so.
- Serve warm with a salad or a soup.
delicious and healthy..
I haven’t really experimented with sweet potatoes much other than of course the regular South Indian staples you have mentioned. This recipe sounds really interesting.
Love the sound of this recipe. Hear so much about the benefits of sweet potato. This seems a novel way of making it. Will try and let you know.
Thanks for sharing such an nice recipe with us. i will absolutely try this at home.keep updating more. U can also visit my website to buy an sell residential as well as commercial properties at My Property Stores,India
improvise is something iam really bad at… peanut crumb sounds super exciting!
very innovative and new dish!!!! very interesting!!SowmyaOngoing Event – Tried and Tasted – Raks KitchenOngoing Event – Dish it out – Lentils & GarlicOngoing Event – Know Your Dairy – Cheese
Hi nandita,I love love such casseroles. its pretty forgiving as one can do the same with potatoes, turnips and even teh rutabaga! The peanuts do add a crunch and I am guessing you`ve used it instead of the bread crumbs we add to the top! Love the bowl . very rustic!’Shobhawww.anubhavati.wordpress.com
I tried this recipe out with chickpeas and sweet potato and it came out super! you are such a god-send!! thank you!! 🙂
I tried this recipe and it tasted good. I faced one problem though, I had doubled the recipe, so used 4 cups of milk. My sauce was slightly runny when I poured it in before baking. After baking, it almost seemed like the liquid separated from the fat. I had a nice crust but at the bottom, it was very runny. Any ideas why? Could it be because I used Low fat milk?
Possible. Next time try reducing the quantity of milk used and use regular milk. Possibly the water content in the milk separated out.