Dinner 11-3-09: Sweet Potato and Kimchi Pancakes
I have an excess of sweet potatoes from the CSA, so I was happy to come across a recipe for Sweet Potato and Kimchi Pancakes on the Serious Eats site. I love sweet potato pancakes, and I love kimchi, but have never thought of combining them before.
Here are the ingredients: sweet potatoes cut into matchsticks, homemade kimchi, chopped scallions, garlic, and chili pepper, egg replacer. Not shown- flour and salt.
Normally when I make sweet potato pancakes I just throw them in the food processor and grate them up. This time I thought I’d actually follow the recipe and cut them up into little matchsticks. What a pain! It took forever, and I don’t think there was any improvement for all that work. If anything, the pieces were too thick and didn’t cook as well as I would have liked. Next time it’s back into the food processor!
Here’s the ingredients all mixed up. Normally I don’t bother with the egg replacer when I make sweet potato cakes, but I think it really helped the cakes stick together well. Sometimes mine tend to be a bit crumbly and I end up saying oh screw the little cakes and just making a big pile of fried sweet potato hash instead. Good to know that the egg replacer really helps!
Here they are, frying. The recipe said to fry for a minute and a half on each side, but they definitely took longer than that. I also ended up with many more cakes than the recipe seemed to indicate, but that’s ok!
Here they are, served with a salad of mixed lettuces and kale, shredded carrots and daikon radish, and a ginger-sesame dressing. Also some tofu sauteed with a sort of Korean BBQ sauce made from gochuchang chile paste, agave nectar, liquid smoke, and cayenne pepper. I didn’t bother with the dipping sauce from the recipe. Overall, I really liked this recipe. It was an interesting twist on plain old sweet potato pancakes and I’d definitely make it again!
