Sweet Potato Pie for Everyone

Creamy, comforting and above all sweet, sweet potato pie is more than dessert. Sweet potato pie is the taste of home, it’s its own love language, and a sweet symbol of Black pride, perfect for Martin Luther King Day.

If your mother, auntie or gran makes it, you know it’s the best. But here’s the thing — every family’s prized sweet potato pie recipe is different.  And then there’s mine. It’s really different.

First off, it’s vegan, so no eggs, no dairy.  It’s got sweet potatoes, of course, but also pumpkin. Cook both to tenderness, whiz together with coconut cream, sweeten with brown sugar and raisins, enrich with spice, and okay, a little rum, and bake. Traditional? Not even close. But it’s a delicious blending of Miami culinary influences. The pumpkin, rum and coconut come by way of our Afro-Caribbean roots, pumpkin pie is an American Thanksgiving classic,.and sweet potato pie is the must-have at every church dinner and family celebration, any occasion that brings people together.

Keep the sweet potato sweetness going.  Register for my free, virtual Roots cooking class happening Fabruary 9, hosted by Miami Dade Public Library.  

How to Make:

For the pie shell:

1. Pulse flour, baking powder and sugar in a food processor.  Add vegan butter and pulse until coarse  Add aquafaba, ice water and vanilla. Pulse again until the consistency of damp sand. The dough will not come together at this point, but will still be grainy.
2. Gather everything up in parchment or foil.  Wrap well and refrigerate for at least an hour or  overnight.
3. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
4. Pat dough into a 9-inch tart ring or pie shell.  Press the dough down firmly, and prick the bottom a few times with a fork. The recipe yields more than enough for a pie, leaving you extra for decorations if desired.
5. Bake the pie shell for 12 to 15 minutes, until the crust is pale gold, and the bottom is set. Remove from oven and allow to cool slightly.
6. Reduce oven heat to 350 degrees. 
7. Place partly-baked tart shell on a rimmed baking sheet.

For the filling:

1. Pour raisins to a small bowl.  Add the rum and let the raisins macerate. 
2. In a food processor, whiz together the sweet potato, pumpkin and coconut milk, until smooth and creamy.
3. Pour in brown sugar, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and clove, and pulse to combine.  Then add the aquafaba and cornstarch and blend to combine.  
4. Drain the excess rum from the raisins and stir them in by hand.
5. Pour the filling into the pie shell, smoothing the top with the back of a spoon. Decorate with any extra piecrust scraps, if desired, laying them gently on top of the custard filling. 
6. Bake at 350 for 30 minutes or until the top is set and the center jiggles just a little. Pie will firm up as it cools.

Caribbean sweet potato pie swaps, tips and backstory 

If this recipe sounds crazy-fusiony, the origin is a Puerto Rican holiday favorite called cazuela that dates back at least a century.  Cazuela isn’t a pie, it’s a pudding, baked in a dish lined with banana leaves to keep the creamy custard from sticking (banana leaves — nature’s Silpats).  Banana leaves are often available frozen in Latin markets, but baking the pudding in a pie shell offers a terrific workaround, and the crisp sugar cookie crust plays off against the creamy, burnished filling. Bonus — you don’t even have to roll out the pastry, just press it into the pan. 

Eggs, the usual sweet potato pie binder, are easily replaced with aquafaba.  

Sweet potato and coconut have had a long love affair you can taste here.  Full-fat coconut milk adds richness without dairy, and just a kiss of coconut flavor. It brings a mellow note that balances sweet potatoes’ natural sweetness.  

The raisins dotting your creamy pie might seem weird, but they provide little extra pockets of surprise sweetness.

Yams versus sweet potatoes — what’s the difference? Dr. Jessica B. Harris can give you the details, but here’s the short version — sweet potatoes got their start in Mesoamerica. They belong to the nightshade family. Yams are a gift from Africa. They’re starchier and less sweet than sweet potatoes, but both are heat-tolerant tubers, easy to grow and resilient.  Even now, Google yams and sweet potatoes come up.  So why fight it?

I didn’t grow up in a sweet potato pie family, but I became obsessed with it because it seemed like at Thanksgiving, we got so many things wrong, and I’m not just talking about the turkey.

Thanksgiving candied yams didn’t do much for me as a kid. It’s not that I didn’t like the sweet sticky syrup they were cooked in or the marshmallows covering the whole shebang. I just didn’t think they needed that much help. They don’t.  They’re naturally sweet, too sweet to be part of dinner, and Thanksgiving pumpkin pie, which everyone made a big honking deal about, was not sweet enough. In my recipe, pumpkin and sweet potatoes, two Caribbean queens, come together.  A few simple tweaks make it vegan.  It’s a pie for Martin Luther King Day, Thanksgiving, any time, everyone. 

Keep the sweet potato sweetness going.  Register for my free, virtual Roots cooking class happening Fabruary 9, hosted by Miami Dade Public Library.  

Caribbean Sweet Potato Pie or Cazuela in a Crust

How to serve: Both the filling and pie dough may be made separately a day ahead, then wrapped and refrigerated before baking. Pie is best served at room temperature. Enjoy as is, or take it over the top with a dollop of coconut whipped cream or scoop of vegan ice cream.

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Course Dessert

Ingredients

  

For the pie shell

• 2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
• pinch baking powder
• 5 tablespoons evaporated cane sugar
• ½ cup vegan butter chilled
• 1 tablespoon aquafaba
• 1 tablespoon ice water
• ½ teaspoon vanilla

For the filing

• ½ cup raisins
• 2 tablespoons rum preferably a dark or spiced rum
• 1 cup sweet potato peeled and cooked until soft or 1 cup frozen sweet potato purée, thawed
• 1 cup pumpkin or half a 15-ounce can pumpkin purée — plain pumpkin not pumpkin pie filling
• 1 cup coconut milk full fat
• ½ cup brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon ginger
• ½ teaspoon nutmeg
• ½ teaspoon clove
• 2 tablespoons aquafaba
• 3 tablespoons cornstarch

Instructions

 

For the pie shell:

• Pulse flour, baking powder and sugar in a food processor. Add vegan butter and pulse until coarse Add aquafaba, ice water and vanilla. Pulse again until the consistency of damp sand. Dough will not come together at this point, but will still be grainy.
• Gather everything up in parchment or foil. Wrap well and refrigerate for at least an hour or overnight.
• Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
• Pat dough into a 9-inch tart ring or pie shell. Press dough down firmly, and prick a few times with a fork. Recipe yields more than enough for a pie, leaving you extra for decorations, if desired.
• Bake pie shell for 12 to 15 minutes, until crust is pale gold and bottom seems set. Remove from oven and allow to cool slightly.
• Reduce heat to 350 degrees.
• Place partly-baked tart shell on a rimmed baking sheet..

For the filling:

• Pour raisins to a small bowl. Add the rum and let the raisins macerate.
• In a food processor, whiz together the sweet potato, pumpkin and coconut milk, until smooth and creamy.
• Pour in brown sugar, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and clove, and pulse to combine. Then add the aquafaba and cornstarch and blend to combine.
• Drain the excess rum from the raisins and stir them in by hand — a food processor will blitz raisins into oblivion.
• Pour the filing into the pie shell, smoothing the top with the back of a spoon.
• Bake at 350 for 30 minutes or util top is set and center jiggles just a little. Pie will firm up as it cools.
• How to save: Cover leftovers with plastic wrap, store in airtight container and refrigerate. If any moisture appears on the surface of the pie, blot gently with a paper towel before serving. Pie keeps refrigerated for several days.

Keyword sweet potato pie

More Fun With Sweet Potatoes

• African-American Sweet Potato and Peanut Stew from my book, Feeding the Hungry Ghost
• Curried sweet potato soup
• Wafuu (Japanese curry)

And for more on sweet potatoes and vegan sweet potato pies:

• Make it Dairy Free
• Black People’s Recipes

Two sweet, fun sweet potato pie history lessons:

• Soul Food Scholar Adrian Miller – How Sweet Potato Pie Became African Americans’ Favorite Dessert
• Southern Foodways Alliance – The Joyful Black History of the Sweet Potato

Keep the sweet potato sweetness going.  Register for my free, virtual Roots cooking class happening Fabruary 9, hosted by Miami Dade Public Library.  

Thank you for reading my vegan stories and plant-based recipes. I sincerely love to connect with listeners and would like to hear your feedback, takeaways, “ah-ha!” moments, etc in the comments.

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