A healthy muffin with a sweet (potato) side
When I told my mother — a fiend for candied ginger — that I was testing a batch of these muffins, she said she wished she could fly right over and dig in. She's not the only one.
There's just something about the combination of sweet potatoes and sweet spices that makes us happy. Every time my grandmother Ruth made her signature spice balls — wonderfully chewy cookies filled with every possible sweet spice — all the grandkids wafted into the kitchen from miles away.
These muffins start with cooked sweet potatoes, which not only provide great flavor and sugar, but also a tempting moistness. Slowly baking sweet potatoes in the oven intensifies their sweetness. For expediency, we chose to microwave them for this recipe. But if you'd rather do it the old fashioned (and tastier) way, plan to bake them for 1 to 1½ hours at 400 degrees.
However you cook them, consider making extra. You can freeze the pulp for future batches of muffins. And I don't bother to purée the potatoes; I just mash them. It leaves the texture slightly and pleasantly chunky.
By the way, if you're wondering about the difference between sweet potatoes and yams, don't expend much energy on it. In the United States, just about anything labeled a yam (or a sweet potato) is really just a sweet potato. True yams, a staple of the Caribbean diet, are rough-skinned, starchy and not very sweet. The vegetable we love at Thanksgiving — and the right potato for this recipe — is the true sweet potato.
Though there still are plenty of die-hard devotees of white flour, I have snuck some whole-wheat flour into this recipe because it is a healthier choice. And the finished muffin's golden color will camouflage the whole-wheat flour. As a practical matter, when a baking recipe calls for white flour, you can almost always swap out half of it for whole wheat with little effect on the color, taste or texture of the finished product.
Another important player in this recipe is buttermilk, one of my favorite ingredients, especially for baking. I like buttermilk's creaminess and its tang. And, contrary to the impression made by its luxurious texture, it's actually very low in fat. Buttermilk is a great item to keep in the fridge; you can use up any extra by adding it to smoothies.
Finally, these bad boys are topped off with some chopped, crystallized ginger (also called candied ginger). But if for some reason you're not a fan, you can top these with the chopped nut of your choice. Just don't tell my mother.
Ÿ Sara Moulton was executive chef at Gourmet magazine for nearly 25 years, and spent a decade hosting several Food Network shows. She currently stars in public television's “Sara's Weeknight Meals” and has written three cookbooks, including “Sara Moulton's Everyday Family Dinners.”