hello this is chef john from food wishes
comm with loaded twice baked sweet potatoes that’s right i’ve loaded
potatoes before and i have twice baked potatoes before but i don’t believe i’ve
ever loaded an twice baked potato and if I have it certainly wasn’t with a sweet
potato but boy am I glad I did and since we’re heading straight into the season
where we’re looking for spectacular side dishes I think the timing is perfect for
sharing this easy and beautiful recipe so with that let’s go hang get started
with hopefully four uniformly sized sweet potatoes and when I say uniform
I’m not talking about length it’s all about the girth so when we’re picking
these out we want to find ones that are about the same size around the middle
and what we’ll do after those are placed on a baking sheet is perform the old
poke oil and roast which means we’re gonna first prick the skin with a knife
so they don’t explode which is extremely unlikely to happen but I still enjoy
saying it and once prick we’ll go ahead and drizzle on some olive oil and then
give them a little massage since I like my sweet potatoes like I like my
bodybuilders well greased and glistening and then what we’ll do once those are
evenly spaced is transfer those into the center of a 400 degree oven for about 35
minutes or so or until completely tender and what we’ll do while we’re waiting
for those to roast is move on to the filling which is going to start by
adding some sliced up bacon to this pan set over medium heat and of course bacon
is the only mandatory ingredient in a loaded baked potato and what we’ll do is
cook that stirring until it just starts to crisp up and as you may have heard me
mentioned before one great visual clue is that bacon fats gonna start to look
foamy and that means most of the fat is rendered out and it’s getting crispy all
right you see that and as soon as our bacon looks a little something like this
we’ll go ahead and add a handful of sliced green onions also known as
scallions as well as some diced jalapeno pepper and what we’ll do is stir that in
and only cook it for one minute and the reason we only need a minute is because
those peppers and onions are going to continue to cook in that hot bacon fat
and by the time this sits and cools down those are going to be perfectly cooked
so what we’ll do after one minute is simply turn off the heat and reserve
those until needed and by the time we’ve sliced and cooked
those ingredients theoretically our potatoes are done and we’ll go ahead and
pull those out of the oven and of course test those with a knife
and since we’re gonna mash this we really do want to make sure they’re
tender so give them the old poka poka and make sure and at this point what
we’ll do is let these cool down a little bit before cutting off the tops and
scooping out the flesh an ideally you do this when they’re warm and easy to
handle and that’s still dangerously hot like mine were but either way we’re
gonna take a knife and cut off the top third of the potato angling our knife
about 45 degrees and we’ll go all the way around and then pop off the top and
I should mention any sweet potatoes gonna work for this but I really like
the orange flesh the best since I believe it’s the most beautiful and the
most nutritious and trying to be careful not to cut off more than a third from
the top all right since that’s gonna provide for a larger shell to fill and
these are gonna be easier to handle and work with and then once we have all
those tops taken off the next step of course is going to be to scoop all that
tender flesh into a bowl all right from the tops and the shells and one tip here
is not to scoop out too much from the bottoms all right I try to leave at
least a quarter inch of flesh inside which is going to give these a little
bit of structure so they don’t collapse when we bake them and then what we’ll do
once all that’s been scooped into a bowl is season it up with some kosher salt
some freshly ground black pepper and of course a little bit of our old friend
cayenne pepper and then besides that we’re also gonna toss in a handful of
sharp white cheddar as well as a nice big spoon of creme fraiche or a spoon of
sour cream or even a splash of regular cream and then we’re gonna finish up by
squeezing in the juice of half a lime and then once all that’s in there we’ll
take a potato masher and we’ll mash this up nice and smooth before we add our
onion bacon and pepper mixture all right we don’t want that stuff to get all
smashed up so what we’ll do is mash this first and then we’ll use a slotted spoon
to transfer that stuff in at which point we’ll give that one last mix and that’s
it once mixed that filling is ready to stuff back into our sweet potatoes oh
and I should mention if you’re not into spicy things you could if you want to do
this with sweet peppers instead I mean you are for all the
Vado of your sweet potato so if you elected not to use the hell pena that’d
be fine but personally I think the heat from the jalapeno pairs perfectly with
the starchy sweetness here but either way we’ll go ahead mix that up in fill
our shells and once we have that transferred in and we’ve done any final
fine-tuning we’ll finish these off by scattering a little extra cheese over
the top all right not too much all right we don’t want complete coverage because
sometimes we’ll take that first bite with a fork and all the cheese comes off
in one giant piece so instead let’s just do a nice scattering and that’s it once
cheese we’ll go ahead and pop those into the center of a 400 degree oven for
about 20 to 25 minutes or until they’re heated through and the tops have started
to brown and they look absolutely awesome and hopefully something very
similar to this check it out I mean if those don’t look like something you’d
want to eat I don’t know what does and at this point those ready to transfer
onto our plates or in my case onto a platter so I could take some pictures
and then once I had those plated up I attempted to do one of the most
difficult maneuvers in all of the culinary arts and that’s to get small
round bouncy sliced green onions to stay on top of a rounded slick a cheesy
surface but eventually I got it done and finally my loaded twice baked sweet
potatoes were officially ready to enjoy and as fantastic as these looked the
taste and texture was even better okay one of my main complaints with sweet
potatoes is that they’re too sweet and not savory enough but here because of
that smoky meaty bacon and bittersweet heat from the peppers and acidity from
the lime and sharpness from our cheddar we’ve really pushed this flavor profile
much further down to the savory end of the scale all right to be honest I
almost forgot I was eating a sweet potato which because they’re so sweet
can really be sort of a OneNote experience but not here we have so many
notes and all of them good but anyway that’s it what we’re calling loaded
twice baked sweet potatoes above and beyond the great taste and appearance
these are also very versatile since they’re just as effective as a
spectacular side dish for your holiday turkey as they are served as a meal
placed next to a simple salad on any random weeknight
which is why I really do hope you give these a try soon so head over to food
wishes comm for all the ingredient amounts of more info as usual and as
always enjoy you

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