Bean & Sweet Potato Gratin – Dinner With Bittman Revised

Dinner by tangent. I’ll admit it. I was desperate for something to make for dinner that I could write about.

I happened to be surfing Twitter when I noticed that Mark Bittman will be at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in a week from now, talking about and reading from his new book, The Food Matters Cookbook. I follow Mark Bittman on Twitter (no, he doesn’t follow me – I’m one in 70,000+ for pity’s sake!), so I checked his Twitter stream, followed a link to his blog, and discovered that “Dinner With Bittman” was Bean and Potato Gratin from his How to Cook Everything.

Sounded right up my alley – especially since I had (almost) everything in my pantry. Here’s my variation:

Bean & Sweet Potato Gratin
(makes 2 dinner portions; 4 side dish portions)

1 15 oz. can white beans (I used Great Northern)
1 tsp. ground thyme (divided)
salt & pepper
approx. 2 medium sweet potatoes (about 1-1/2 lbs)
1/2 cup vegetable stock
3 Tbs. butter (divided)

Preheat the oven to 325º F.

Drain the beans and spread them in the bottom of a 1 quart baking dish. Season with 1/2 tsp. of ground thyme, salt and pepper lightly, and mix thoroughly.

Peel the sweet potatoes and cut in half, lengthwise, then slice them thinly into half rounds. Arrange the slices on top of the beans, overlapping them.

Add the vegetable stock to the dish, sprinkle with the remaining thyme, salt and pepper, and dot the top with half the butter. Cover with aluminum foil and bake for 45 minutes.

Uncover the dish, dot with the remaining butter, and bake uncovered for another 45 minutes.

*Notes:

The original recipe is made with “starchy white or all-purpose potatoes,” called for 1 cup of stock (chicken, vegetable or plain water), and is supposed to reduce to a rich glaze. That didn’t happen here. Either there was too much liquid, or the sweet potatoes aren’t starchy enough. In future, I will cut the liquid by half, and reflected that reduced amount here in my recipe.

All in all, we really liked this with the sweet potatoes. It was very colorful and the texture contrast of the sweet potato/bean combination was brighter and more flavorful than it would have been with the white potatoes.

Draw your own conclusions – try Mark Bittman’s Bean and Potato Gratin, then try this variation. Playing with your food is fun!