My family loves these Roasted Sweet Potatoes with Marshmallows. It's a two-ingredient side dish, mostly hands-off, that we make throughout the fall - not just at Thanksgiving.
Roasted Sweet Potatoes with Marshmallows at a Glance
- ⏳ Prep Time: 20 minutes, split
- ⌛ Bake Time: 1 hour 10 minutes
- ⏲️ Total Time: 1 hour 30 minutes
- 👨👩👧👦 Serves: 8
- 🍽️ Calories: 203
- 🍠 Main Ingredients: Whole sweet potatoes, marshmallows
- 👌 Why You'll Love It: Roasted sweet potatoes are split and topped with marshmallows for a fresher, no-canned-yams version of the holiday classic.
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Deeply roasting whole sweet potatoes makes them sweeter and provides the soft, fall-apart texture that the traditional casserole usually uses butter or syrup to achieve. The only thing I add is marshmallows to the top. Since Thanksgiving dinner has a lot of food, there's no need to have it all be rich. Plus, I'd rather save all the sugar for dessert, like Pecan Pie.
I've been making my sweet potatoes and marshmallows this way since Thanksgiving 2018 - and while it's easy enough to make the day of, I often prep the sweet potatoes in advance. And since it's so simple, we can have this side dish any time of year - we don't have to wait for a holiday, to the cheers of my daughter and husband.
If you also love sweet potatoes all year round, be sure to check out my Sweet Potato and Peanut Stew.
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Why You'll Love This Recipe
- 🍠 Roasting sweet potatoes in their skins concentrates the sugars and deepens the flavor, so they taste more sweet potato-y.
- 🍬 No added fat or syrupy goo - just marshmallows on the top, where you'll taste them front and center.
- 🦃 It's simple to prep in advance to make Thanksgiving day that much easier.
Key Ingredients
Sweet potatoes: Choose whole sweet potatoes without many blemishes. They're likely labeled "yams" at the grocery store. The skin may be reddish, and they'll have orange flesh inside. Larger sweet potatoes cook better for this recipe than do smaller ones; be sure they're all the same size so they're done at the same time. While you can use white sweet potatoes, I don't recommend it; they remain firmer and are not as softly textured once cooked.
Marshmallows: I prefer mini marshmallows so I can spread them out evenly - I use about half a standard-sized bag. Large marshmallows will work fine. Brand doesn't matter.
I don't add spices, but if I were, I'd start with 1 teaspoon of pumpkin pie spice or ground cinnamon, sprinkled on the sweet potatoes before topping with marshmallows.
How to Make Roasted Sweet Potatoes with Marshmallows
Scrub the sweet potatoes, and scrape or slice off any offensive blemishes or bad spots - this is especially important if you won't peel the sweet potatoes later.
One: Place sweet potatoes on a baking sheet, preferably lined with parchment or a silicone mat for easy cleanup. You roast these long enough that they will ooze syrup, which will caramelize on the pan. Poke each potato several times with a fork to allow steam to vent.
Two: Bake at 425F for about an hour. Baking time depends on how big your potatoes are. (These are 6 ounce sweet potatoes and needed to bake a little less than 60 minutes, when I checked them.) Test the potatoes for doneness with a fork; they should be very tender, with almost no resistance.
Three: Cut and optionally skin the hot sweet potatoes. Be patient! Use tongs to transfer each baked sweet potato to a cutting board. Use the tongs to hold the potato still, cut off any inedible ends, then slice it in half lengthwise. Peel if desired - I sometimes do if the skins are very thick. Cut each half into as many sections as you want.
Four: Transfer sweet potatoes to a greased baking dish, and top with plenty of marshmallows, spreading them around.
Five: Reduce the oven temperature to 350F and bake for another 8-10 minutes, until marshmallows are melty and beginning to brown. (If using a metal pan, you can broil the marshmallows instead.)
Serving and Storage
Serve the sweet potatoes warm.
Reheat individual servings of leftovers gently, covered to make sure marshmallows don't dry out. Marshmallows will slide off and even melt when warmed up, so nestle them into the center of the potatoes before heating them.
Make Ahead
To prep for Thanksgiving, I roast the sweet potatoes up 3 days in advance, then skin and cut them up, and store in the refrigerator. On Thanksgiving, I transfer the sweet potatoes to a greased baking dish. Reheat at 350F for 10-15 minutes, until the sweet potatoes are warm, before topping them with the marshmallows and baking another 10 minutes as usual.
I cannot recommend baking the whole dish and then refrigerating it for later. The dish will still need 20-25 minutes of reheating, and the marshmallows will likely melt entirely or scorch.
Why Sweet Potatoes and Marshmallows?
I didn't know until recently that this dish was invented in 1910s - specifically as a way to sell factory-made marshmallows. Today we know marshmallows as a commonplace sweet - cheap to buy, and found in so many things, like breakfast cereal! Making marshmallows isn't necessarily difficult - in fact, I make several batches of Homemade Marshmallows each year. However, it's not a fast process, and the homemade ones are too good to be used in a side dish. A newfangled store-bought ingredient, on the other hand - what a way to make a dish special.
Food historian Sarah Lohman traces the dish's history, noting that the native sweet potatoes have been widely used in American cuisine for hundreds of years. Makes sense that cooks would embrace a distinctly American dish and top it with the newly cheap novelty of marshmallows.
The high amount of sugar in a sweet potato casserole always discouraged me from making it. It doesn't surprise me that the recipe was promoted by food manufacturers; that seems to be the American way. We have enough sugar in our modern diets, though, that it's good to step away from the cans.
Roasted Sweet Potatoes with Marshmallows FAQ
Not really, but they're marketed the same. Sweet potatoes are indigenous to Central and South America, while true yams are native to Asia and Africa. True yams are a different vegetable, more akin to yucca, and are starchy and not sweet. Grocery stores label orange sweet potatoes as yams, but that's mainly to differentiate them from the firmer variety.
Roasting/baking whole sweet potatoes concentrates the sugars, making them taste sweeter. Well-roasted sweet potatoes become very soft, so you don't need additional fat for texture, and are very easy to peel. Roasting whole sweet potatoes is a single step, unlike boiling which involves cutting, peeling, monitoring them as they boil, and hoping they don't fall apart when you fish them from the water. You also lose some nutrients to cooking water during the boiling process.
No. Cut off blemishes as necessary; those open spots will weep sugar, which may brown. I don't consider this a problem. Once they're cooked, peeling is a personal preference. If I've trimmed off blemishes, I will likely include the skins as I don't mind them and they're full of nutrients. However, skins can be tough to eat and not very pretty; you may not want to include them in the dish on a holiday.
I roast my sweet potatoes at 425F, but exactly how long depends on size. Six-ounce sweet potatoes were likely done at 50 minutes. Nine-ounce and 12-ounce sweet potatoes needed at least 60 minutes; the larger ones may have needed longer.
Stick a fork in it - you should be able to easily pierce the skin, the flesh will be soft, and there'll be no resistance. If they're roasted for an extra long time, the fork may just push the skin down into the soft sweet potato - and that's not a problem. They're definitely done; just use the tip of a steak knife to pierce the skin before cutting.
Other Great Thanksgiving Dishes
Thanksgiving is a day when I pull out family recipes, like my husband's family's pumpkin pie - and my grandma's chocolate pie always makes its way to the table for the holidays. Plus, once the weather turns cooler, bourbon cranberry cocktail becomes our go-to drink for October, November, and December - casual enough for any evening, but festive enough for the holiday.
I hope this becomes a recipe you'll return to. If you try it, a star rating below helps others find it - and I'd love to hear how yours turns out in the comments! 💕 Questions or trouble? Drop a note, and I'll do my best to help.
📖 Recipe
Roasted Sweet Potatoes with Marshmallows
Equipment
- baking sheet
- baking dish
Ingredients
- 3 pounds sweet potatoes (whole; be sure they're all about the same size)
- 5 ounces marshmallows (preferably miniature marshmallows; about half a bag)
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 425F. Scrub sweet potatoes and trim any bad spots or blemishes from them. Place them on a baking sheet (lined is best for easier clean-up) and poke them along the top and sides a few times with a fork.
- Bake for about an hour, until your sweet potatoes are done. Smaller ones will be done sooner. They should be very tender and easy to pierce with a fork.
- Next, cut and optionally skin the hot sweet potatoes. Use tongs to move one to a cutting board. Holding each potato with the tongs, use a sharp knife to cut off pointy, inedible ends as necessary. Peel if desired. Slice sweet potato down the middle lengthwise, then cut each half into half or as many segments as you'd like. Repeat for each sweet potato, then use tongs to remove pieces to a large and greased baking dish.
- Place sweet potatoes in a greased baking dish, and top with marshmallows. Bake at 350F for 8-10 minutes, until marshmallows are melty. Bake longer if you want them to brown; if using a metal pan, you can broil them. Serve warm.
Leona Konkel says
I love sweet potatoes, and I really enjoy this recipe. I hope you also like it. If you try it, let me know how it turns out!