Sous Vide Purple Sweet Potato Puree

Sous Vide Purple Sweet Potato Puree is a sweet, creamy, stunning substitute for your pumpkin or sweet potato dishes.

Bringing you a jewel-toned batch of  Sous Vide Purple Sweet Potato Puree for this instalment of #sousvidesista. A sweet, creamy, stunning substitute for your holiday pumpkin or sweet potato dishes.

Instead of having to trek around the city, popping into a series of little shops and markets for my favourite ingredients, I now have a one-stop place that pretty much covers the globe. No, this is not a sponsored post.

I am especially pleased with their seafood section - I found conch there in the summer... FRESH CONCH!! The conch shell is pretty special (my sister and I spent many hours playing phone with them at my grandparents'), but the real treat is what's inside.

The sweet, tender meat is great raw in salads and ceviche, but my favourite conch dish is gumbo. And man did my uncle make a mean gumbo growing up. I also had a conch empanada a few years back on vacation and that's a pretty close second.

All the drools right now just thinking about them, but I digress...

CLICK HERE TO PIN FOR LATER!

Sweet Potato or Yam?

The produce section is pretty amazing too - from Ume to fresh sugar cane to Ube, Japan, the Caribbean and the Philippines fit deliciously into my shopping cart.

I would be lucky if I could find one variety of purple sweet potato at some of the other shops, here I found three - Stokes, Ube and Okinawan. A couple years ago, I was under the impression all purple sweet potatoes were Ube, but a friend's mom schooled me on the differences. In short:

• Stokes - grown in the USA, purple skin, intense purple flesh (= higher anthocyanins), dense texture and lovely sweet flavour. I love adding them to a tray of roasted potatoes, soups and desserts for a pop of colour.
• Okinawan (or Hawaiian Sweet Potato) - grown in Japan and Hawaii, beige skin, soft purple flesh that resembles lavender, creamy texture and less sweet flavour.
• Ube - a staple in the Philippines (where my friend's mom is from), a scruffy, less attractive skin, lilac or purple-speckled white flesh, sweet, nutty flavour. While the two above are categorized as sweet  potato, Ube is a yam proper. It is almost impossible to find here, so I normally purchase it in grated, frozen form and use it to make ice cream and other desserts.

CLICK HERE TO PIN FOR LATER!

Why Sous Vide?

As I touched on here, we love preparing vegetables sous vide. We achieve perfect doneness every time, with pronounced purity of flavour. Vacuum sealing reduces the effects of oxidation, so the colour of your veggies remain vibrant, sometimes intensifies. Even the most delicate vegetable stays intact.

Green vegetables don't seem to fare so great in the colour department, when treated to a sous vide bath, as I touched on here. Like us humans, they seem to thrive in the presence of oxygen.

SO... I used the Stokes for my Sous Vide Sweet Potato Puree, because... look at that colour! The colour of this particular sweet potato generally intensifies when cooked and even more so when cooked sous vide. Plus, it's the best colour of the three. My Ube ice cream is usually an underwhelming greyish-purple, but with this it is a mouth-wateringly, brilliant purple.

Here's a quick video of how I made Sous Vide Purple Sweet Potato Puree. Check back in a few days to see how I used this batch.

CLICK HERE TO PIN FOR LATER!