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Classic Sweet Potato Pie

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Move over Pumpkin Pie! This Classic Yam Pie will soon become your favorite Fall dessert.

I will admit that I love sweet potatoes for the simple fact that by the time most cooks are done preparing them, they’ve become more of a ‘candy’ than a vegetable – at least here in the states, and especially around the holidays. For example, it isn’t odd to see sweet potatoes at Thanksgiving prepared mashed with brown sugar, molasses, sweet cream, and then topped with melted marshmallows – and that’s my family’s favorite savory take on them.

In all honesty, that’s also my favorite version of them – but we’ll keep that as our little secret.

With that in mind, and with Thanksgiving planning looming large, I decided I wanted to try my hand at a recipe I had first learned from a close friend of mine from when my son was still in grade school – Classic Sweet Potato Pie.

Rather than prep the sweet potatoes as a candy and then have them masquerade as a dinner table item, this pie is unabashedly a dessert item, pairing deliciously with your choice of caramel sauce, whipped cream, or – preferably – a whipped marshmallow topping.

Now, while you certainly ‘can’ get away with a store-bought crust, that doesn’t mean you ‘should.’ Especially not when the crust really isn’t even the hard part of this recipe. After all, that’s the one part of this recipe that I purposefully called ‘Basic.’ Hint: The name is indicative rather than ironic.

How basic? Chop up half a cup of butter, and blend that together with flour, sugar, and salt, then add in some cold water to make a dough, work it together, and ‘blanket’ it over your favorite baking dish. That’s it. Seriously, that’s all there is to it, and it will taste a universe better than anything you buy in the store.

Pinch the sides of the dough to the baking dish with a fork for effect and pre-bake the crust on its own for about 10-12 minutes.

For the filling, we start with two large sweet potatoes – shocking, I know. Bake the sweet potatoes at 350 degrees until they are for tender roughly forty to fifty. Then add the sweet potatoes, sans their skin, to a large bowl with heavy cream, milk, eggs, brown sugar cinnamon, nutmeg, and vanilla, and mix until these ingredients area thoroughly incorporated. You want a uniformly dark orange puree.

Then pour the puree into the pie crust, and bake at 350 degrees for about one hour and fifteen minutes, or until you can poke the center of the pie with a knife, and have the knife come out clean.

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Classic Sweet Potato Pie

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  • Author: Living the Gourmet
  • Prep Time: 10 minutes
  • Cook Time: 1 hour 25 minutes
  • Total Time: 1 hour 35 minutes
  • Yield: 8 1x
  • Category: Dessert

Ingredients

Units Scale

For the Basic Pie Crust:

  • 1 1/4 cups flour
  • 2 tbs. sugar
  • 1/2 tsp. salt
  • 4 oz. unsalted butter – cubed
  • 4 – 5 tbs. cold water – as needed

Filling:

  • 2 large sweet potatoes – baked until fork tender
  • 1 cup heavy cream
  • 1/2 cup milk
  • 3 eggs
  • 3/4 cup dark brown sugar
  • 3/4 tsp. ground cinnamon
  • 1/2 tsp. fresh grated nutmeg
  • 1 tbs. vanilla

Instructions

For the Crust:

  1. Place the cubed butter, flour, sugar and salt.
  2. Using a steel manual pastry blender to cut flour into crumbled pieces.
  3. Add the cold water slowly to form into a dough.
  4. Dust a clean surface with flour and roll out the dough to fit a 9 ½ -inch pie dish, with a little draping over the sides.
  5. Pinch the dough around the sides and press down with a fork.
  6. Pre-bake the crust for 10-12 minutes. Let cool on a rack before filling.

For the Filling:

  1. Preheat Oven 350 degrees F.
  2. Bake the sweet potatoes until fork tender; let cool and remove the skin.
  3. In a large bowl place, the sweet potatoes; add the heavy cream, milk, eggs, brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg and vanilla.
  4. Using an electric mixer on low speed mix until the ingredients are all incorporated.
  5. Pour into the pie crust.
  6. Bake approximately 1 hour and 15 minutes or until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean.
  7. Let cool before serving.
  8. Store in the refrigerator.
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Then let the pie cool, and serve.

Enjoy!

3

Reader Interactions

Comments

  3. Joanna @ Everyday Made Fresh says

    Hmm, yum! I love your take on my family’s favorite holiday pie. This was the pie that graced every holiday get together in our family. It was the only orange colored pie that I had ever eaten until I met my husband, after I was grown. Growing up in the south, we did sweet potato pie, and if you requested pumpkin you were looked at like you had an extra eye growing on your face. So sweet potato it always was, and ever will be! 🙂

    Reply

  6. Sharon says

    Sweet potatoes large, how large?
    How many cups of cooked sweet potatoes would u say that it takes to make this pie?

    Thanks,
    Sharon

    Reply

  7. Emily says

    I just got some sweet potatoes from a friends garden! I somehow did not think about making a pie with them, that is such a better idea than eating them plain 🙂

    Reply

  9. Karyn says

    This looks so good..I have never tasted sweet potato pie before! And it looks quite easy to bake

    Reply

  14. Beth says

    Oh my word! That sounds amazing! I’m a huge sweet potato fan! I must make this! I think I’ll make it for Thanksgiving!

    Reply

  15. Jacque says

    I keep telling myself I need to make this in place of pumpkin pie. I have pinned this to remind me while planning our dinners. Thank you!

    Reply

  18. swathi says

    Sweet potato pie looks delicious holidays without pumpkin and sweet potato pie is hard to imagine, this perfect crispy crust and delicious creamy pie I am in for dig in.

    Reply

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