Fingerling Sweet Potatoes Are the Next "It" Vegetable and We Are Fully On Board

Maybe you only eatsweet potatoesonce a year, shellacked with sugar andcrusted with marshmallows. Maybe you eat them often,stuffed with beans and topped with guacamole. Maybe you’re a sweet potato fiend—you eveneat them for breakfast!

But if you really want to earn your sweet potato merit badge, you should seek outfingerlingsweet potatoes. And soon.

What are fingerling sweet potatoes, anyway?

Simply put, they’re the cute little siblings of the sweet potatoes you already know and love. Sometimes they're so small because of an early harvest; other times they were planted too close to other plants and didn’t have enough room to spread out. Most varieties of sweet potatoes can be harvested at fingerling size—Lancaster Farm Fresh Cooperative in Pennsylvania grows a rainbow of sweet fingerlings, including dark-maroon skinned Garnets, orange-skinned Beauregards, as well as mini Japanese sweet potatoes. According to the Coop’s Executive Director Casey Spacht, these fingerlings—which are often only harvested once, as fields are cleared for the season before first frost (so: right now)—generally make up about 25 to 30% of the total crop yield.

Fingerlings' small size (they're often as slender as a hot dog and just a few inches long) means they’re not the kind of thing you’ll likely see at a national supermarket chain. “They are not desirable," explains Adam Hainer of Juniper Hill Farm in Wadhams, NY. "They don't meet the large food system's packing standards." Spacht says that “before folks were interested in them” there was no choice but to “leave them in the ground and/or eat them ourselves.” But in recent years, they’ve seen growing enthusiasm from chefs and farmers’ market customers, who are willing to pay a premium.

“Anytime you can create a cool high quality niche product out of a less-desirable product, it’s an awesome win for the farmer,” says Spacht.

Why are we so into them?

Smaller sweet potatoes cook quicker, making them especially convenient for weeknight dinners. And while large sweet potatoes can be a little stringy, these little guys offer a uniformly soft texture. Most importantly, notes Epi’s Senior Food Editor Anna Stockwell, the skin is more tender than the skin of a full-grown sweet potato, which means it’s sweet and pleasant to eat.

While you can use any of your favorite fingerling potato recipes, Anna’s go-to move is thesteam-and-smash. “You can steam them in advance and keep a bunch of steamed mini sweet potatoes stashed in your fridge,” ready to go for the week, she told me. Just set up a steamer basket with an inch of water and put the mini sweet potatoes in the basket, covered. (No need to peel them first!) Bring the water to a boil and steam until a cake tester or paring knife slides through the potatoes easily. Then you can chill them, or let them sit on your counter for an hour or two while you do the rest of your cooking.

When you're ready to go, smash the fingerlings on a cutting board, using a cup or sturdy spatula. You can crisp the fingerlings in sizzling oil, but if you’ve got a skillet greased with the flavorful fat left over from cooking chicken thighs, lamb chops, bacon, or steak, toss the potatoes in there while you let the meat rest. Cook the potatoes over medium-high until they’re crisp, about 3 to 4 minutes per side.

If you want to get fancy and you're looking for an excuse to use your newimmersion circulator, follow Chef Bill Telepan ofOceanain NYC, who adds a mixture of honey, salt, and espelette pepper to the bag of potatoes before cooking sous vide. (You know hot honey's always a good idea.) As with steaming, you can do the sous vide cooking—Telepan does his at 194 degrees F for an hour or so, though others cook them as low as 150 degrees—in advance, then finish the dish in the oven to get a crisp exterior on each mini sweet potato just before serving. Or, ahem, devouring all of them straight from the pan.

Of course, fingerling sweet potatoes can do anything a full-size sweet potato does, too.Roast them and serve over crispy lentils with a creamy, tangy feta-tahini sauce. Crisp them up in a hash or cut in half to get some nice brown edges. Slice ‘em into a salad dressed with lots of tart lime. Warm them up in the morning and top with maple syrup, yogurt, and crunchy granola, or sprinkle with smoky bacon, scallions, and crown with sour cream or a runny egg. Just don’t wait until Thanksgiving—by then they may be long gone.

A Vegetarian’s Dream Sweet Potato Dinner

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