Sweet Potato Apple Casserole

Name: Sweet Potato Apple Casserole
Prep time: 10 min
Cook time: 35 min
Total time: 45 min
Ingredients: 2 apples (cored and thinly sliced (1/4 inch thick)); 2 small sweet potatoes (or 1 large); 2 ½ tablespoons unsalted butter; 5 teaspoons maple syrup; 1 teaspoon cinnamon; 1/4 teaspoon allspice; 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves; 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg; 1/8 teaspoon salt

by Meghan on November 13, 2015 44

This healthier sweet potato casserole is sweetened with maple syrup. Perfect for your Thanksgiving table!

I was never a big fan of the candied yams that are almost always on the Thanksgiving table. In fact, I’m pretty sure that I thought I hated sweet potatoes until well into my twenties because of them. The large chunks of sickly sweet orange “yams” and then the bizarre marshmallow topping? What is that about? Don’t get me wrong. I love marshmallows, like, a lot. I just found the whole thing to be weird and I wasn’t a big fan.

By the way, did you know that the “yams” sold in American supermarkets are actually just sweet potatoes? True yams are starchy tubers from the Caribbean. So orange, white or purple, pretty much everything we see in the grocery store in the U.S. are sweet potatoes, even if they are labeled as “yams”.

This healthier sweet potato casserole is sweetened with maple syrup. Perfect for your Thanksgiving table!

I’m not sure when this dish replaced the marshmallow yams for my family, but it was after I was already an adult. My mom learned how to make this from some friends of hers and she started making it for our Thanksgiving dinners. It didn’t take long for me to start thinking of it as a “must have” on the Thanksgiving day table. The first year I had Thanksgiving without her, I had to call her for the recipe.

This healthier sweet potato casserole is sweetened with maple syrup. Perfect for your Thanksgiving table!

I love that it is a slightly different take on the traditional, and in my opinion it tastes much better. Since the sweetness only comes from maple syrup and the apples, it doesn’t have that overwhelmingly sweet quality. It took me a few tries to get the recipe pinned down to exactly as good as my mom makes it, but it seems like my last attempt was the winner.

This healthier sweet potato casserole is sweetened with maple syrup. Perfect for your Thanksgiving table!

I made a smaller serving size of this dish because, well, I made it three times and there are only two of us here. So this recipe is only to serve four, but feel free to double or triple the recipe depending on how many people you are serving. I tried this two ways. One was to drizzle the maple syrup and then sprinkle the spices on each layer, but I found that the spices did not get evenly distributed that way. I preferred to mix the spices, maple syrup and butter together and then spread each layer with the syrup mix. That made the texture better and allowed the spices to be more even. You will notice that on some of my photos the spices are sprinkled on, but the recipe will have my preferred method detailed.

This healthier sweet potato casserole is sweetened with maple syrup. Perfect for your Thanksgiving table!

The other thing is that the sweet potatoes need to be par cooked before going into the oven with the apples, because the apples cook much faster than sweet potatoes. We just microwave them for a few minutes, which also makes them easier to cut! And last of all, you can actually sub butternut squash for the sweet potato and it tastes almost the same.

This healthier sweet potato casserole is sweetened with maple syrup. Perfect for your Thanksgiving table!