We visited my mother recently and she served us a New Orleans sweet potato pie. It was amazing, tasty, powerful and sweet. Eduard loved it. For me it was a tiny bit too sweet and too heavy. I did appreciate the taste and texture of sweet potato in a pie, so I decided to try and make a lighter version when we would arrive back home.

By the way, did you know that French people until recently refused to eat sweet potato, as it was considered food for livestock. Interesting! I wonder if it’s true?

Anyhow, this weekend I finally found the time to try making my own sweet potato pie. I started by replacing the 175gr of sugar in the original recipe by twelve figs and basically left most of the old recipe as it was. I did have to change part of the butter in the recipe for coconut oil, because I didn’t have enough butter in the fridge. Otherwise I would have left the butter as is.

And although the pie turned out different than the original version, it was perfect in it’s own way. It was a light, fruity and sweet, but not overly sweet. It was a bit like a spicy sweet potato cheese cake. Yum! Here is how you can make my slightly healthier take on a New Orleans sweet potato pie.

new orleans sweet potato - a healthy alternative

Ingredients

– 1 sheet of puff pastry to fill a pie dish
– 850gr sweet potato
– 40gr butter
– 110gr coconut oil
– 2dl milk
– 4 eggs
– 12 dried figs (remove stem)
– 1/2 tsp ground vanilla
– 1 tsp ground cinnamon
– 1/2 tsp ground pumpkin spices

What to do

Clean the sweet potatoes end cook them for 40 minutes in their skin. Peel them after cooking and mash them up in a bowl. Mix all the other ingredients in a blender, then combine them with the mashed sweet potato and use the immersion blender to mix everything together.

Preheat the oven on 190C. Place the puff pastry in a pie dish and punch a few holes in the pastry with a fork. That way your pastry will be able to breathe and the mix on top won’t crack (like mine did). Then add the whole mixture on top. If you really think that you will need a bit more sugar than only twelve figs, you can now fill a flat spoon with brown sugar and sprinkle it lightly on top. But you don’t have to.

Bake it off for about 50 minutes in the oven. The crust on the side could be browner than mine is, but I didn’t want it to burn the top more than needed. If you don’t have that problem, you can let the crust become more brownish before you take it out. The most important thing is that you take it out of the oven when it feels compacted. Let it cool down. Serve it like is or with a dollop of cream. Enjoy!

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