Oven Roasted Sweet Potato ‘fries’ with Orange Salt

How to make oven sweet potato ‘fries’:
Turn your oven up to 220 C /425 F . They need to heat to extract the moisture and crisp up a bit. Sweet potatoes don’t crisp up as easily as regular potatoes so the high heat helps in this regard. I also find it best to roast than in a fan oven, but a conventional oven will do fine on the middle shelf.
Don’t overcrowd the pan when you roasting, as they will give off too much steam and soften. Allow some space between the fries to brown up.
If they are a bit soft, you can spread them on a baking cooling rack placed on a baking tray and place in the oven on a very low temp for 10 – 20 minutes to dry out.
So to make these, lightly toss your sweet potato fries in olive oil and then spread them out on a baking sheet. Make in batches if necessary or if you have a fan oven, load more than one tray. Roast for 30 – 35 minutes and until golden. You could turn them over once during the roasting time, but I find the tops and bottoms get nice and golden without much meddling.
To make the orange salt, add good quality sea salt flakes such as Maldon to a pestle and mortar and grate the zest of an orange in there. It is quite potent, so work on a ration of 3: 1 salt to zest. For a small quantity of salt, you might only need to use the zest from a quarter to a half an orange. Grind this up until you have a yellow tinged salt blend that will make your sweet potato fries pop with flavour. Thyme is another great flavour that works well with this salt, so you could throw a few leaves in the mix to add earthy herbaceousness. You can also roast the sweet potatoes with a few sprigs of thyme.

Oven Roasted Sweet Potato ‘fries’ with Orange Salt

Ingredients

Instructions