Alton Brown's sweet potato pie

To honor the upcoming holiday and to participate in an awesome group I learned about on Twitter, last weekend I decided to finally make Alton Brown's sweet potato pie. This recipe is one languishing on the "to cook list." However, since the time of the year brings us a bounty of sweet potatoes at the old megamart there was no better time to cross it off the list.


First I started with locating some fine sweet potatoes and resisting from calling out the produce manager on labeling the bin "yams."

Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

Surprisingly, the 1.3 pounds of sweet potatoes call for was only two large taters.

For the crust, instead of allowing myself to heed AB's approval of using frozen pie crust, I opted to make a crust. This idea sprang from another pumpkin pie recipe I saw years ago. It is a ginger snap crust. About 30 crushed snaps (store bought, yeah I admit it), two tablespoons of melted butter and some sugar. The crumbs, sugar and butter are mixed together and pressed into a pie pan. In my case, a nifty peacock blue Fiestaware pie dish. Then blind baked for about 10 minutes at 350 degrees.

While the crust was baking, actually before, I started the sweet potatoes cooking using Alton's method of steaming. The only way I've cook sweet taters before is microwaving. But for larger amounts the steaming method is easy, though not quick. The sweet potatoes ended up needing an extra five minutes in the steamer to become full soft.

Before makes this pie, I checked the reviews on Food Network's site. Seems a lot of people complained about the yogurt, saying it gave the pie a funny taste. One reviewer even complained about the lemon, I never figured that one out since there is absolutely no lemon in the recipe. Odd.

The yogurt did not make the pie taste strange. I have used yogurt in several recipes, a lot of them from AB, and it never makes the dish taste strange. I thought maybe because I like yogurt the taste didn't bother me, so I asked my mom if she noticed anything odd about it. She doesn't like yogurt. She told me it was a great pumpkin pie and has said talked about the next time I make it. So, yeah, it went over well.

The only change made was omitting the maple pecan topping. Since I have a nut allergy it had to go.

Although I liked the ginger snap crust, the next time I'm trying a traditional pie crust.

Note the snazzy oven mitts. :)

Oh, if your curious the Twitter group takes a monthly theme on food and post writings or photos about the theme and tweets to #letslunch.

Since there is an apparent canned pumkin shortage this year, make the best pumpkin pie using AB's sweet Potato pie recipe.