Southwestern Stuffed Sweet Potatoes - Easy Recipes for Family Time - Seeded At The Table (2024)

FAQs

How many sweet potatoes do I need for 20 people? ›

“A general guideline to estimating how many sweet potatoes you need when hosting friends or family for a meal is one medium sweet potato per person,” Burgess says, as if she's done this many times before.

Directions. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Scrub the potatoes, prick them several times with a knife or fork, and bake them for 1 hour or until very soft when pierced with a knife.

TIPS & TRICKS to Make this Recipe: The main secrets to achieving that incredible crispy texture, is to soak the cut sweet potatoes in cold water for at least 30 minutes. This helps remove the starch from the sweet potatoes so they´re not limp & soggy.

Potatoes: Peel or pare and chop up to a day in advance. Store in a bowl of cold water in the refrigerator. Sweet potatoes: Peel and chop 3 to 4 days in advance. Store in a sealed bag or container with an airtight lid in the refrigerator.

Potatoes or sweet potatoes: 5 to 6 ounces per person, which equals about 1 large Yukon Gold or white potato, or half of a large sweet potato. Pie: 1 pie will feed 8 people if you've got other desserts as well. If there are no other desserts, it will feed 6 people per pie.

I'd make between 10-15 lbs. 10 lbs is enough mashed potatoes for around 8 adults getting reasonably sized servings (ie large).

Wrapping the sweet potatoes in foil ensures that they don't dry out too quickly, and allows you to add aromatics if desired. Unwrapping the sweet potatoes and increasing the oven temperature produces charred, roasted flavors and caramelizes converted sugars.

Baking can also cause an 80% drop in vitamin A levels, twice as much as boiling. Therefore, from a nutritional standpoint, boiling rather than baking should be recommended for cooking sweet potato.

Can You Cook Sweet Potatoes in the Microwave? Yes, you can! In fact, the shorter cook time will help the sweet potatoes retain more nutrients that are often lost in the long oven-baking process. It's not all that different than baking a sweet potato in the oven, except it's a whole lot faster.

Bake, don't boil

Baking sweet potatoes caramelizes their natural sugars, especially when done whole. It intensifies their flavor and creates a richer taste compared to boiling, which can result in a watered-down, bland flavor.

Should you boil sweet potatoes before baking? ›

Parboil the potato chunks with baking soda. This draws the starch out and helps the potatoes get crispy and golden on the outside. After boiling and draining the potatoes, shake and toss them in a bowl so that a mashed potato-like paste builds up on the outside of the pieces.

Boiling sweet potatoes retains more beta-carotene and makes the nutrient more absorbable than other cooking methods such as baking or frying. Up to 92% of the nutrient can be retained by limiting the cook time, such as boiling in a pot with a tightly covered lid for 20 minutes.

Peel and season with butter and salt to taste. Use 1 medium sweet potato per person. Boiled sweet potatoes can be used for pies, cookies, casseroles, glazed, candied or frozen.

Cutting sweet potatoes in advance is a great way to meal-prep your way to an easier weeknight dinner, but raw sweet potatoes dry out pretty quickly after they're cut. When chopping sweet potatoes in advance, make sure to store them in cold water in the refrigerator.

One pound raw fresh sweet potatoes = 3 cups shredded, cubed or sliced = 1 3/4 cups cooked, mashed.

For a big spread with lots of side dishes, you'll want to have about four ounces (125 grams) of potato (that's precooked weight) per person. If you're serving fewer sides, you can up it to about eight ounces (250 grams) per person.

Four large sweet potatoes can easily feed 8 people or more if it's the main side dish. For the holidays when you have lots of sides, it can serve 10 to 14.

On average, potatoes lose about 25% of their weight during the peeling and cooking process. So, if you start with 10 pounds of potatoes, you'll end up with approximately 7.5 pounds of cooked potatoes. Based on this calculation, you have enough cooked potatoes to serve 30 people.