Vegetables
Sweet potato
Behaves nothing like a potato: more sugar, less starch, and it burns at the temperature a chip wants.
What it does in fast-moving hot air
Sweet potato carries far more sugar and far less of the fine surface starch that makes a chip crisp. The sugar caramelises and then burns at temperatures a regular chip is perfectly happy at, which is why the published whole-roast figure is 190°C where a jacket potato is 200°C. The flesh also holds more water and less structure, so wedges soften rather than developing the fluffy interior a floury potato gives. A sweet-potato chip that is genuinely crisp is difficult and usually involves a coating.
Why the cut matters
Filed as a vegetable rather than under potato, because it is not one and treating it as one is the mistake. Every published figure for it is cooler or longer than the equivalent potato figure, and the reason is sugar.
Cooking pages
- Sweet potato wedges — Thirty to thirty-five minutes at 200°C for 500–600g of hand-cut fries on oven racks, and they will not crisp like a potato chip.
- Whole sweet potato — Fresh whole sweet potatoes get thirty to forty minutes at 200°C in one manufacturer's charts for two machines; two other figures name no state.
- Sweet potato chunks — Fresh sweet potato in 2.5cm chunks gets fifteen to twenty minutes at 200°C in one manufacturer's charts for two machines.
- Frozen sweet potato fries — Eighteen to twenty minutes at 190°C — cooler and longer than ordinary frozen chips.
This page gives no cooking answer of its own. A food does not have one — a cut, at a thickness, in a state, at a loading, in a particular appliance does. Any figure mentioned above is one manufacturer’s, and the page for the cut says which machine, quantity and state it was printed for, or that the manufacturer named no state.