Skip to content
Cape Braai
DE
← All recipes

Side · In Afrikaans: Soetpatats

Sweet potatoes out of the coals

Whole sweet potatoes in foil, 45 minutes beside the coals, then torn open and filled with rosemary butter or cinnamon sugar. They cook themselves while everything else wants attention.

Soetpatats is one of the oldest South African sides and is traditionally baked with butter, brown sugar and cinnamon. In the coals it picks up something an oven cannot give — the skin turns into a crust.

Prep
10 min
On the fire
45 min
Serves
6
Effort
easy
A baked sweet potato torn open lengthways, the flesh bright orange
Helfmann · CC BY-SA 4.0

How hot

Gentle

You can hold your hand over the grid for 8 seconds · ≈ 150–175 °C

Every coal stage explained →

Which wood

Rooikrans

spicy, resinous

More on this wood →

When it goes on

Once the meat is off

The coals are dropping off. Now bread and braaibroodjies go on.

Equipment: Foil

This line

Trekboers and Voortrekkers1652 to about 1900

The three-legged pot, sausage as a way of keeping meat, bread without an oven.

Fresh at the Western Cape January · February · March · April · May · June · July · August · September · December

Method

  1. Make the butter

    Stir the ingredients for whichever version smooth and chill. Both keep a week and are easy to prepare ahead.

  2. Wrap them

    Rub the sweet potatoes with oil, salt them and wrap each tightly in foil. Without foil the skin burns before the middle softens.

  3. To the edge of the coals

    Not into the middle of the fire but at the edge of the coal bed — where eight seconds on the hand test applies. They cook there alongside everything else without taking up grid space.

  4. Turn and wait

    45 minutes, turned once every 15. They are done when a skewer goes through without resistance. Large ones can want an hour.

  5. Tear open and fill

    Unwrap, tear open lengthways and fluff a little with a fork. Put the butter in while they are hot and serve before they cool.

Tips

  • The sweet potatoes go to the coals first, before any meat. They are the one item that takes this long and still asks for no attention.
  • Two layers of foil if the coals are fierce. One is enough at the edge, not in the middle.
  • Offering sweet and savoury side by side is not a compromise — with sweet potatoes both work, and the guests decide.

Sweet potatoes in the coals are the most relaxed side a braai has. Ten minutes of preparation, then 45 minutes in which nobody has to do anything, and they occupy not a centimetre of grid.

The trick is where they go: not into the middle of the fire but at the edge. It is hot enough there to cook through in three quarters of an hour, but not so hot that the skin chars before the starch has turned to sugar.

And that is the whole point. A sweet potato from an oven is good; one out of the coals is sweeter, because it was warm more slowly and for longer.

Watch this

Linked, not embedded — opening this page contacts no outside server. The time marks jump straight to the moment.

After recipes by

Goes with this