Basic and very easy recipe for sweet potato pancakes that is very popular with my kids . . .
These have become the fall-back way to get our kids to eat vegetables when all else fails.
This all started when my 2-year old son was on a vegetable strike and really needed some fiber. I was trying to find something that might be more approachable for the little guy. I found an adult recipe for sweet potato pancakes and modified it a bit. And these worked! A little too well, maybe.
After feeding him these simple sweet potato pancakes, I had to google whether he had a sweet potato allergy. So many diapers that day. Google told me that my child was under-fibered and needed to eat sweet potato on the regular. Which is good, because he really likes these. They’ve now become part of our rotation of high-fiber toddler go-tos.
You have been warned.
These are always a hit at home. To keep things easy, I often make a batch of batter at the start of the week. Then I can fry up several pancakes every other morning until we are out of batter. The sweet potato pancakes make the house smell amazing, which makes it easy to get the kids out of bed, dressed, and downstairs to the kitchen for pancakes. They also make great on-the-go snacks because they don’t leave crumbs and the kids can eat them with hands only.
You need to think a bit ahead when making sweet potato pancakes, because the recipe calls for mashed sweet potato. So you need to cook the sweet potatoes before you can begin to prepare the batter. I typically throw the sweet potatoes in the oven the evening before while I’m doing post-dinner cleanup. Just don’t forget they’re in the oven!
That said, if you have an unanticipated need for sweet potato pancakes one morning, you can always use the microwave to cook them up quickly. I’ve done this a couple of times now. This only takes a few minutes, but peeling hot sweet potatoes is not for the faint of heart (hot hot hot!) You’ll need to get good with utensils. Am I a bad mom for now wondering if this is a good way to encourage my 4-year old to use her fork?
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Simple Sweet Potato Pancakes
This is a very versatile sweet potato pancake recipe. You could add green onions or chives, or you could replace the soy sauce with cinnamon and ginger to make a spiced version. Don’t be deterred by the long cook time — most of this time is the sweet potatoes sitting in the oven while you can frolic about without a care in the world. They cook just as well if you are off chasing children down or doing other things, and if you forget about them (as I often do) you’ll be reminded by the delicious caramelized sweet potato smell.
- Total Time: 1 hour 20 minutes
- Yield: 10+ pancakes
Ingredients
Instructions
1. Preheat the oven to 400F.
2. Cook the sweet potatoes.
Prick sweet potatoes all over with a fork, put them on a tray lined with aluminum foil (for easy cleanup), and bake at 400F for about 45 minutes.
I like to cook them until I can see the juice oozing out and caramelizing a bit. Err on the side of over-cooking (this will make mashing so much easier!) This also gives them a deeper, almost caramelized flavor. I typically do this the night before I plan to make pancakes while I clean up from dinner and then start with the next step in the morning. This way, the sweet potatoes have cooled and don’t destroy my fingers when I remove the skin and mash them, and I don’t have much to do in the morning.
That said, if you, like, NEED sweet potato pancakes one morning and didn’t do this step the night before, and you don’t want to wait 45 minutes to bake sweet potatoes, you can prick them all over with a fork and then microwave them until soft. Should only take a few minutes (microwave the sweet potatoes in increments of 1 min and poke them with a fork to see when they’re soft all the way through). Just be careful when peeling/mashing the hot potatoes to protect your fingers from blistery doom.
3. Mash the sweet potatoes.
After the sweet potatoes have cooled, peel off the skins and mash them well. If cooked long enough, they should be very easy to mash with a fork.
This recipe assumes you will have roughly 3 cups of mashed sweet potato following this step, but keep in mind that this recipe is very flexible and the measurements don’t need to be precise.
4. Finish the batter.
Sprinkle ½ tsp salt & 1 tsp soy sauce over the mashed sweet potato and mix well.
Then fold in half of the 1 1/4 cup flour and combine. Then add the second half of the flour.
5. Fry up some pancakes.
Melt some butter in a nonstick frying pan over medium heat. Place a dollop of batter into the pan, and try to smooth it out into a flattish pancake. If you’re having difficulty smoothing them into pancake shape, just leave it like it is and let it cook for about 1 minute, and then flip it over and mash it down with a spatula (the bottom will have cooked, so this will now be much easier).
6. Cook the pancakes a couple minutes on each side until golden brown.
Keep in mind that the second side always browns faster!
Since I usually fry these in butter, I typically don’t offer them to my kids with any toppings. I may be the weird one in that I actually don’t like syrup on my pancakes – my husband will typically give the kids maple syrup (but to his credit, he generally trades tiny pours of syrup for them eating other stuff on the plate, like eggs).
7. Enjoy!
Notes
Troubleshooting: If the pancakes start falling apart while cooking, you probably did not mix in enough flour. In this case, add another 1/4 to 1/2 cup flour to the mix.
- Prep Time: 75 min
- Cook Time: 5 min
- Category: Breakfast
- Method: stovetop
