Week 22 Finalists- Best Sweet Potato Recipe

Photo Slideshows

Click the slideshows to watch us prepare the finalist dishes from this week's Best Sweet Potato Recipe contest.

Sweet Potato Soup with Feta and Zaatar Oil

Sweet Potato Soup with Feta and Zaatar Oil by lauren

One of the things we like best about this recipe is how lauren takes a few simple ingredients, adds a couple of exotic touches and manages to produce a dish that's both comforting and thrilling at the same time. The soup itself is silky and hearty, the sweetness of the potatoes tempered by the aromatics; a finishing swirl of zaatar oil (zaatar is a Mediterranean seasoning typically containing sesame seeds, thyme, oregano and salt) and a sprinkling of crumbled feta elevate the soup to sophistication. One cooking note: our soup was a bit thick after we pureed it, but a bit of water brought it to just the right consistency. - A&M

Zaatar, an herb blend with sesame seeds, often including thyme, hyssop, and oregano, is used as both a flavoring, in an oil such as this, or a condiment on hummus or sandwiches.

Lauren calls for the carrot to be diced. Merrill has impressive knife skills, but since the soup will be pureed, precision is not terribly important for any of the vegetables.

Cleaning the leeks. (See Amanda's explanation here)

Be sure to watch the oil carefully -- you don't want to burn the zaatar.

Lauren thoughtfully reminded us to remove the bay leaf before pureeing.

It turns out, Amanda is a daredevil with the immersion blender. It came reaaaally close to us being covered in soup.

Amanda however, was proud of the pretty patterns she could make. Here, she saw flowers.

Our soup may have simmered for a moment too long, so after pureeing, along with seasoning the soup, we added a splash of water to thin it out.

Southwestern Spiced Sweet Potato Fries with Chili-Cilantro Sour Cream

Southwestern Spiced Sweet Potato Fries with Chili-Cilantro Sour Cream by TasteFood

The briliance of the sweet potato fry is that with all the sugar in the potatoes, you can really lay on the seasonings. Here, TasteFood has you use chili powder, cumin and cayenne. You might want to double the recipe so you'll feel better about sharing. You'll want to eat the first batch plain and the second tempered with the tangy sour cream sauce. And as we discovered, the hard way, cayenne's heat varies a lot -- start with 1/4 teaspoon and add more if you like. - A&M

TasteFood doesn't peel the sweet potatoes for this dish, so neither did we. But we did scrub them.

The spices are bold -- salt, cumin, chile powder, paprika, cayenne and pepper.

It's easiest to toss by hand.

Be sure to arrange these in a single layer, and remember to flip them in the oven. When we tested these, they took a few minutes longer than specified, as we wanted them to get nice and crisp.

We got 1 tablespoon of lime juice from half a lime.

We found sweet chili sauce in the Thai section of the grocery store.

We made the sauce just as the fries went into the oven, so it had a few minutes to sit before we ate it. The flavors melded nicely.