Jackson Jambalaya

I promise, I am not making disparaging remarks about our governor. You must trust me for a moment while the vision floods your brain of our Honorable Gov’s momma pinning a corsage on his blue plaid jacket, kissing his forehead, and telling him goodbye as he departs for his first Jr. High sock hop dance.

No, forget him. I am actually referring to sweet po-taters that come from the garden.

Step one of creating your very own sweet potato magic would be to buy a sack of fresh sweet potatoes.

 Then we take them home and use them to make some tasty stuff for your dinner table. 

In my opinion, not much says "southern dessert" better than a sweet potato pie.

With Thanksgiving just around the corner, I thought I'd show you how I make this delicious classic southern pie. Fortunately for me and at least some of you, sweet potato pie is really easy to make. My intent is to provide all the information you'll need to have folks take a bite and say, "This tastes just like the Sweet Potato Pie ZeroBear makes."

For one pie, you need:

2 large Sweet Potatoes (or 3 medium, or four small) - about two or 2 1/2 cups of cooked potato.
2 large eggs
2 teaspoons Cinnamon
1/2 cup sugar, or your sweetener
1/2 stick butter
1/8 teaspoon (maybe less – to taste) ground nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon (maybe less or not at all – to your taste preference) ground cloves
1 Pie crust – this pie has no top crust. 

A note on pie crusts – I can make a scratch pie crust and will post a recipe for an easy way to make your own pie crust later, under a different post. However, I would feel uncaring if I failed to tell you that since we aren’t entering our pies in the best pie competition at the State Fair (this week!), the commercial refrigerated (rolled up crusts with no pan) from the dairy section of your local market will work very well for this pie. I could recommend the Pillsbury Dough Boy brand name, but store brands work just as well. You will need a pie pan if you buy and use the rolled up crust only version of refrigerated crusts. In a moment, I will tell you the frozen crusts in tin foil pans work nicely, too. Let me go ahead and get that out of the way.

For this pie, the preformed, frozen crusts, from the frozen pie crust section of your market also work very well, since the function of the crust on this pie is to hold the solid sweet potato filling of the pie well enough for you to sneak into the refrigerator at 11:57 pm to get your hands on “just one more smallish slice of pie - maybe with a small shot of whipped cream from the squirt can, or not, since squirting it might wake up the wife, who told you to save some for tomorrow.”. You probably know that frozen in the pan crusts come in two types, shallow or deep-dish crusts and that they come in pre-formed aluminum pans, designed for mass produced pie crusts. The pie crust depth you use is your decision. I usually use the thick depth crusts when I go that route.

However, we had an old family friend (Ms. Louise Smith) who (for years) made 30 or 40 (she really made that many) sweet potato pies and gave them away as a few days before Christmas gifts. She used frozen shallow dish crusts for her pies, and I know of no person who got one or two, who ever complained their Christmas gift pie was in a shallow tin foil pan crust from the local Piggly Wiggly market. The love Ms. Louise put into her pies far outweighed any impact from the depth of crust she used.

Enough wasting of your valuable time. Here is how I do them.

Directions:

The sweet potatoes must be pre-cooked for this pie. You can peel, cut up and boil your sweet potatoes in a boiler with unsalted water but boiling only adds moisture to the potato flesh that must be cooked away. I prefer to bake my potatoes and use the dryer baked potato flesh in my pie. If I bake too many, it also gives me one or two taters to eat.

To bake them, wash the potato if they are still dirty from the potato patch, wipe a little vegetable oil on the skins and oven bake them on a sheet pan (to catch any sugary baking discharge from the potatoes, that will mess up your oven). It usually takes about an hour at 400 degrees F. When the potatoes get soft when you squeeze them, they are done.

I like to bake one or two more sweet potatoes than I need for the pies and eat them with butter and sugar. Life is short. Why not enjoy a good baked sweet potato occasionally? If you do that, make sure you have some butter sugar and cinnamon to top your treat.

Do this once and you will be making them all the time to go with dinner

Sorry, let me get back to my pie recipe.

After the potatoes cool a little, I peel them and add everything (sweet potato, sugar, egg, butter and spices) to a mixing bowl.

Then add the mixture to an uncooked crust in whatever pie pan you are using.

Cook the pie in a 350 F degree preheated oven for about 40 - 45 minutes. It is best to use a baking sheet under the pie to keep your oven clean. I didn't do this in the next photo, but that doesn't mean it is not smart to protect your oven.

Bake the pie until a toothpick stuck into the filling comes out clean.

I like my pie chilled, so after it cools on the counter, I cover it with plastic wrap and refrigerate it until chilled. However, you like your pie hot, cold or warm, it is fine to go ahead and cut it. Some might want a dollop of whipped cream on their slice and that is fine.

If it is covered with plastic wrap, this pie will keep fine in the refrigerator for a week or longer. There is no way it ever lasts that long at our house. Too many late-night opportunities for me to need a long storage time.

A few words about sugar and the spices used in the recipe for this pie. The ingredients and quantities I have listed here work fine – not too sweet or spicy. However, here is a suggestion for experimentation you might enjoy. You can bake a (trial) sweet potato and add cinnamon and sugar, or nutmeg if you are a nutmeg person. If the amount of sugar and spice you add to your baked sweet potato tastes good to you, then extrapolate how much will be needed for two or three potatoes and use that much in your pie. The eggs help the pie to set up as it cooks and are a necessary part of the recipe.

Substitutions – If you want to substitute brown sugar or honey as sweetener that is fine. If you want to use artificial sweetener (Splenda or other) in your pie, that is fine. It will change the texture slightly, but artificial sweetener makes an excellent pie. If you use an egg beater product instead of real eggs, substituting that product will also make a very good pie.

As I said, I don't add vanilla to my pie. This is an old depression era country recipe and farm folks had no money for vanilla back then, but you can add a teaspoon to your filling if you like. 

It is ok to use canned sweet potatoes as long as you understand they have quite a bit of water and that will make the pie much slower to set and you will need to extend the required baking time to dry the batter properly. This recipe will also make a nice pumpkin pie if you follow the same general rules.

This is a very easy sweet potato pie to make. I can assure you, when we sit down for our family Thanksgiving in a month or so, there will be two or three of these on the sideboard at our house. Ms. Louise is no longer with us (RIP) so the recipe will be used again time at Christmas. Probably in January and February too.

Thanks for looking at my recipe. 

God Bless You.