Purple Sweet Potato Pie
I haven't done much single-dish posting here, but I wanted to show off the purple sweet potato pie I made during my long weekend.
Making one of these has been on my to-do list for years! This is a first try — it was also my first time making a pie in several years. The flavor was as good as a normal sweet potato pie but nothing unique. But that color was the entire point.
I had wanted the filling to be perfectly blended, but after seeing the finished product I quite like the color contrast, and it's nice to see bits of unadulterated, deep purple potato.
I used my standby sweet potato pie recipe from a Farm Journal compilation cookbook (handwriting in scan is my mom's). My only alterations were substituting Okinawan sweet potatoes for the typical orange ones, and I used a blend of cinnamon, clove, cardamom, nutmeg, and coriander for the spice.
The crust is the basic-ass pastry from the 1963 edition of the Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book, Crisco and all, because the thought of having to cut butter into flour was making me seriously consider skipping the entire project. I used apple cider instead of water, after seeing a tip in the same book to use orange juice to flavor pastry, and it didn't make a damn bit of difference.
This was also my first time actually attempting the make the crust look good, as opposed to just folding the extra pastry over the filling and calling it “rustic”. I never made anything remotely good-looking with playdoh as a kid and it's coming back to haunt me.
I forgot to get whipping cream at the store the previous two times I shopped, so the pie got eaten naked. I had envisioned it with lightly flavored whipped cream (I hadn't decided on a flavor) and a sprinkle of the pinkish-purple rose sugar I made this past summer, but it didn't happen.
I also keep losing track of the time and finishing cooking projects after the natural light has disappeared for the day (before 5!), and having dishes pile up... Photos were rushed and taken in a state of next-day dejection.
Notes for next time:
- Use butter in the crust.
- Cover the edges of the crust with tinfoil to prevent more browning, if I care on that particular day.
- Try citrus juice in the crust, why not. Maybe a cookie crumb crust with gingersnaps.
- Try coconut milk. A lot of the recipes online use it, but I don't necessarily trust strange food blogs I've never seen in my life. Does it substitute 1:1? I'll find out sometime.
- If the store ever stocks sweet potato varieties with redder/pinker flesh, grab some. A pink sweet potato pie would be really pretty.
- Fancy! Fucking! Garnishes!!
