If You Like Sweet Potatoes, You’ll Love These
Molokai Sweet Potatoes
Purple Deliciousness from Hawaii
Sweet potatoes have a great personal significance to me. My great-grandfather, whose name I bear, was a sweet potato farmer in Kentucky. He was a farmer his whole life, and a hard life it was. I never met him, as he died ten years before I was born. I was never even really told much about him. One of the few things I do remember is that he was a hunchback, the result of an accident on his farm. Let nobody tell you that farming is an easy life. He did well for himself, though, and was even in a position to lend money to other people in his community when it was needed.
I have been eating sweet potatoes my whole life. They are a nutritious and incredibly versatile food. They are not true potatoes, but are the tubers of a plant in the morning glory family¹. One of the fixtures on our Thanksgiving dinner table was always candied sweet potatoes. That’s an easy dish to make. Just place the cubed sweet potatoes in a baking dish and cover them with marshmallows and a little brown sugar scattered over the top. Bake them until the sweet potatoes are soft, and try not to eat them all before the serving dish makes it to the dinner table.
Another great thing to do with sweet potatoes is to just mash them much as you would russet potatoes. I do not do mashed potatoes the way most people do. We lived in Pittsburgh, PA for a year in 2007–2008. Pittsburgh, home of the Steelers, is a city that is fanatical about its sports teams. The locals there talk a lot about smash-mouth football. In keeping with the sports orientation of the city, a lot of the local foods are given sports themes or associations. I started hearing about “smashed potatoes.” This is not as weird as it sounds. Basically, the potatoes are mashed without being skinned first. The skin is cooked along with the potatoes and provides some extra color and textural interest in the dish. On that, I do not obsess about getting the lumps out of mashed potatoes. I have seen people go to absurd lengths to get all the lumps out of mashed potatoes. I say, it’s a potato; who cares if it’s got the occasional lump?
I like a little heat with my food, but my wife is deathly allergic to peppers. This is not really as much of a problem as it might at first seem. It just means that when I cook, I need to figure out a way to get heat in there by other means than the usual approach of just dumping in handfuls of Guatemalan Insanity Peppers (apologies to The Simpsons) or whatever. In the case of mashed russet potatoes, I will scrub the potatoes clean, cube them, boil them, and mash them, then mix in generous amounts of butter along with some salt and white pepper. Use the white pepper sparingly, as it is really hot. A little goes a long way, and you can always add more. Overdo it and there’s not much you can do. With that mixture, add in some half & half, enough to bring the whole thing to a creamy, but still firm, consistency. Heaven.
Sweet potatoes are not really suited to heat, but they still make excellent mash. For those, I scrub the skin clean, cube the potatoes, boil them until soft, and mash them with butter and half & half. Heavy cream also works, but you may need to use a little more of it, as it is not as wet as half & half. If you want to get some holiday flavor in there, maybe toss in a little nutmeg. Sweet potatoes also work really well curried. There’s plenty of curry recipes out there featuring sweet potatoes.
When we moved to Maui in 1999, I heard about a type of sweet potato that I had never before encountered: Molokai Sweet Potatoes. Of course, I had to learn how to use the things. It’s just not acceptable to me that there would be a type of sweet potato that I hadn’t cooked with. The Molokai sweet potatoes have kind of a nutty honey flavor. It’s hard to describe, but easy to get used to. They are weird to work with. They have a resin in the skin that makes them hard to cut up. The first time I cut one, I got my chef’s knife stuck about halfway through the tuber, and it stuck firm. I wasn’t quite sure what to do, as the knife was cemented in place as though with glue. I ended up just tapping the potato on the cutting board to force the knife through. I managed to get the rest of the potato cut up with minimal loss of digits, but it was slow going. Took a long time to get all that resin cleaned off my knife blade too. I didn’t mind. The results were worth it.
For that first attempt to cook Molokai sweet potatoes, I just cubed and boiled them, then put them inside manapua dough, and steamed them. Manapuas are the Hawaiian version of Chinese bao. The one everyone recognizes is char siu bao, the steamed buns filled with sweet barbecued pork that you see on every dim sum platter. That is a popular flavor in Hawaii, but it is only the beginning of the variations manapua can take. You can find those buns everywhere, and filled with just about anything. Barbecued chicken is popular, as is kalua pork, and one of our friends mentioned manapuas filled with Molokai sweet potatoes. Those sweet potatoes are a deep purple color, and are so packed with natural flavor, it is a shame to add anything to them. It is hard to describe the deeply satisfying feeling of biting through the warm, sweet dough of a freshly steamed bun and into the soft, nutty, honey-sweet purple goodness of a Molokai sweet potato.
There are any number of ways to prepare Molokai sweet potatoes. I had some purple sweet potato mochi, that sticky Japanese confection. I also had fries made from Molokai sweet potatoes. Those were not quite as crispy as fries made from russet potatoes, but still very yummy. Another place the Molokai sweet potato shines is in one of my favorite Hawaiian dishes, lau lau, a wrapped package of fish, fatty pork and sometimes a bit of Molokai sweet potato. The variations are endless, and very worth exploring.
As far as where to get these delicious tubers, it depends on your location. In Hawaii, any grocery store will carry them. Outside Hawaii, it kind of depends on where you shop. I have heard Asian markets carry them. If your grocery store has a well-supplied produce section, you may get lucky. If the Molokai sweet potato is unavailable, there are other purple varieties you might try, such as the Okinawan sweet potato. If nothing else, trying something like this might get you out of your culinary comfort zone and into some cuisines you have never considered.
