Spicy Lime Sweet Potato Mash

It’s a mouthful of a name, but worth every bit of it.  It’s one of those recipes where I want to shout from the hill tops with a blue sky backdrop and birds encircling overhead: THIS IS DELICIOUS! I am in love with the flavors of limes and sweet potatoes these days and really really like this spicy mash version.  I made something similar to this before called Chili Lime Sweet Potato Fries, which isn’t spicy and uses chili powder for smokiness. One of my best friends tops oven-roasted, cubed sweet potatoes with plenty of cayenne and black peppers. Then when it’s out of the oven, she adds fresh cilantro and lime juice. Amazing, right?  This Spicy Lime Sweet Potato Mash is something like the love-child of those two recipes.  Oh and it’s only five ingredients.

Ingredients:

• 3 medium sweet potatoes
• 2 TBSP butter, room temperature
• 1 tsp lime zest
• 1 tsp kosher salt
• 1/2 tsp ground coriander
• 1/4 tsp ground cayenne pepper (double if you aren’t a spice wimp like me)

Prep:
Peel, cube and boil the sweet potatoes.  Since we’re going to mash them, we can chop them into a smaller cubes, speeding up the cooking process.  Fifteen to twenty minutes should work.

The best way to distribute the spices and zest into the potatoes is via the compound butter method.  Compound butter is super simple–so simple I feel a little silly that it’s something I only recently started doing.

Take the two tablespoons of butter and add to it the remaining ingredients. Bring together into a paste…a buttery, spicy, savory paste.

When the potatoes are done, drain the water out. I use the lid to the pot to hold the potatoes back. Super technical… impressive really.  I like to mash the potatoes in the boiling pot to take advantage of that residual heat.

When the potatoes are drained, add all of the compound butter and mash.  No other ingredients are required. If you’d like to garnish, use a little extra lime zest or a lime slice or two so your guests know what to expect. Cilantro wouldn’t be wrong here, but I do appreciate the subtlety and low notes of the ground coriander instead. I feel it allows the brightness of the lime to shine without competition.  *FYI, coriander is the seed of cilantro.

One variation that I’d like to experiment with is substituting coconut butter in place of traditional butter.  Coconut should meld nicely with this flavor profile. If you elect coconut butter in lieu of the regular stuff, give it a shot and let us all know how it goes!