Fun With Purple Sweet Potatoes

Last year my purple sweet potatoes did really well. These made up the bulk of my sweet potato harvest, and we’ve been enjoying them as oven fries or cubed and roasted with turnips or sometimes other veggies. The other day, I decided to try them in a sweet potato pie for our weekend dessert. 

I peeled a couple of them, cut them each into several large chunks, and simmered until tender. Then I ran them through the blender.

I thought the resulting puree was a gorgeous color. 

To make the pie, I used my no-dairy Sweet Potato Honey Pie recipe. The addition of the golden honey and bright yellow egg yolks changed the color a little, but it still baked up as a distinctly purple pie.

Or maybe that’s more of a purplish brown, but one would never know the difference in a blind-folded taste test. It was a yummy sweet potato pie.

I had some puree left over, so the following Sunday, I made sweet potato pancakes. Except these were nowhere near purple! 

My guess is that the pH of the batter changed the color. For my baked goods, I always use a baking soda + acid combination from How To Bake Without Baking Powder. For these, it was baking soda + sour cream which gave me beautifully fluffy green pancakes! They were delicious with a little maple syrup. Very fun. 

Anyone else experimenting with something different?