Gryffin Tries: Making Alton Brown’s Sweet Potato Pie

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We have a boat-load of fresh sweet potatoes right now.  Soon, we’ll be making sweet potato soup and canning the rest of these babies.  I actually am not very fond of sweet potatoes, but my family loves them.  I but my husband really wanted sweet potato pie.  I’ve never had a sweet potato pie that I liked.  I have made a lot of pies before, but this is my first foray into sweet potato pie.  My family isn’t from the south, so we don’t have an old family recipe for this dish.  When I do not know anything about making a dish, I always look for an Alton Brown recipe first.  I love his recipes because he explains the science behind the decision.  It helps me to know why I can and cannot change certain ingredients, or the history behind them.

The history behind sweet potato pie seems difficult to pin down.  Several different web based searches come up with several different answers.  Sweet potato pie specifically has a history in the American south, and is usually considered a soul food dish.  Methods of cooking the sweet potatoes may have carried over from methods of cooking yams in Africa, or have been transported along with the sweet potatoes from South America.

Alton’s original recipe can be found here.

We used:

1 pound 3 oz sweet potatoes

1 ¼ c plain yogurt

¾ c dark brown sugar, packed

1 tsp cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon nutmeg

5 egg yolks

Pinch of salt

1 premade pie crust (of the Pillsbury variety, not the frozen one Alton suggested)

We also omitted the maple syrup.  My mom was one of the people we knew would help us eat the pie, and she has a very strong aversion to maple.

Our Method:

  1. Remove the pie crust from the fridge and allow it to warm to room temperature while you make the pie filling.
  2. Peel the sweet potatoes and cut them into chunks.  We followed Alton’s suggestion to steam the potatoes.  They took longer than 20 minutes to be done.
  3. Turn the oven on to preheat to 400 F.
  4. Alton Brown suggests using the paddle in your mixer in order to mash the sweet potatoes and mix the other ingredients.  We did not have the best results making the pie this way.  I used the regular whip attachment for my blender.  The pie has a smoother consistency if you mix a splash of milk into the potatoes with about half the yogurt as if you were making mashed potatoes.
  5. Mix the rest of the ingredients into the bowl.  We used double the spices that Alton Brown used in his recipe.  I do not know if our spices were older, or if we just like a stronger flavor.
  6. Roll the pie crust out into a pie plate.  Gently push the crust into the pie plate.
  7. Pour the filling into the pie crust.  Pinch the edges of your pie crust to create ridges, or simply fold over any extra crust onto itself so you do not burn the edges.
  8. Use some aluminum foil or a pie guard to protect the edges of your pie.  Place the pie on the middle rack of the oven and bake for approximately 35 minutes.  I put a cookie sheet on the rack below just in case I have a spill.  When I made this pie, I had no issues though.
  9. Remove the pie guard and continue to bake for about 15 minutes.
  10. When your timer goes off, if the pie looks to be the same consistency across the top, remove it from the oven and let it cool.  If the center looks very different from the edges, allow the pie to cook a little longer.
  11. Allow the pie to cool before slicing.  We think it tastes best with a little bit of whipped cream.