See previous blog post for thoughts on coconut milk. The original recipe is absolutely delicious, so this recipe is really just trying to recreate that deliciousness without the peanut butter and without the cream, so that it's a tad less cholesterol raising. I'd really appreciate people trying this out and saying if they think it works - if it does, then I'm going to try using the coconut milk in other dishes where you'd normally use cream.
(I haven't fiddled with that picture at all, so it's probably not the best quality - but it's there to give you an idea of the size of the dish)
Ingredients
- About 1 kg of sweet potatoes - this is about two medium sized sweet potatoes, In My Mind **
- One tin of creamed coconut milk
- Sunflower, corn or olive oil (each adds its own flavour - I used sunflower which is probably the least flavoured)
- Garlic - a few cloves (three to four)
- Chillies - as many as you need to make four helpings of something mildly spicy. This would probably be about one of those thin, curly chillies you can get from an Asian shop (see the picture at the top of that article). Err on the mild side because you just need a little bite, not for the chilli to be the main show. If you are worried about it being too hot, just use the red flesh and make sure you throw the seeds away.
- One lime (a lemon might do if you can't get lime)
- Tahini paste
- Salt
Procedure
Heat the oven to Gas Mark 5 or 190 C
Find a largeish gratin dish. I used a fairly shallow one, because I wanted the 'milk' to evaporate a little, but you could also try using a higher-sided, less-wide dish.
Empty the tin of creamed coconut milk into a large bowl. To the bowl, add the chopped chillies and crushed garlic and a splash of the oil and a pinch of salt. Peel the sweet potatoes and chop them into discs about the width of a 10p piece. Add the sliced sweet potato to the coconut milk mixture and let it stand for a few minutes, after giving it a good stir.
While that's standing, zest*** and juice the lime and add the zest and the juice to a blender with about 150 g of tahini - about a third to a half of a normal jar. Whizz the lime juice and tahini together and if it's too stiff, add a little (say, a tablespoon) of your oil.
Grab about half of your sweet potato slices and spread them around the bottom of your gratin dish so that they are more-or-less flat and covering everything. Dot the tahini mixture on the top (this is most probably where you might need to use the oil to make it more spreadable, although I just left huge dollops all over the potatoes), and then cover with the other half of the sweet potatoes, emptying the remains of the coconut cream mixure over everything once the potatoes are in the dish.
Stick the gratin dish, covered with foil, into the oven for twenty minutes. After twenty minutes, remove the oil and let the mixture bake down and brown for another thirty minutes. Remove and eat.
Thoughts: I'm eating it right now, and the tahini is less sweet than the peanut butter was in the original. It's actually crying out for some toasted cumin seeds in it as well - I'd toast a couple of teaspoons in a frying pan and sprinkle them on the first half of the mixture, along with the tahini / lime blend next time. The coconut cream seems to do the job of the cow's cream well enough, though.
**You have been warned. Measurement is for sissies.
***Lemon and lime juice on their own are pretty feebly-flavoured - all the flavour and scent is actually in the peel, hence the use of zest. Also, bearing in mind the fact that orange peel appears to have cholesterol-lowering properties (see last post), I'm making the (almost) unwarranted assumption that lemon and lime peel will have similar properties, so it can't hurt to include lemon, lime and orange zest where you can.
I'd made the original recipe from the Guardian article a few weeks ago and we'd really enjoyed that. Because cooking at the same time as running bed-time for the kids is tricky, I followed your recipe step by step (ie, didn't spot the suggestion for cumin seeds!) I basically halved your quantities, except I (inadvertently) used the juice of the whole lime - this was actually good, a nice consistency for spreading and the flavour came though well. I also used a 250ml carton of coconut cream rather than (half) a 400ml can of coconut milk.
ReplyDeleteAs delicious as the original, and certainly going to be repeated. I liked the tahini substitute for peanut butter - in fact, I'm tempted by tahini+lime juice as a spread for toast. Perhaps it was a little less dramatic than the peanut, so this was more comfort-food than the look-at-me of the original. As it came out of the oven, there seemed to be a lot of liquid, but dishing it up it seemed to be absorbed by the sweet potato - certainly there was none left in the dish or on the plates. I also think I over-baked it at the covered stage - overall it was a bit soft and not crispy enough on the top. I wonder about how to give it a crispy topping to really give it a crunchy contrast - perhaps if I had just cooked it uncovered for longer it would have had crisped up on its own.
Possibly. Do let me know what you discover - I suspect that ground pine nuts over the top might brown nicely. This is most certainly less heart-attack inducing than the original.
ReplyDelete