Sweetheart Dessert: Organic Sweet Potato Pie with Raspberry Sauce

In order to maintain our Certified Organic status, our sweet potato farm must pass a rigorous annual inspection. Since we passed our recent inspection, we decided to share a recipe highlighting organic sweet potatoes. (If you source all ingredients from organic producers you can make this dessert 100 percent organic!)

Sweet potato pie is a dish commonly associated with the fall and the holiday season. Sweet potatoes can stay in the ground until the first frost. According to Mother Earth News, the more time sweet potatoes can remain in the ground, the more nutrients develop. They're typically harvested in late summer to allow a few weeks to cure, and then stored and shipped. Due to the natural harvest schedule, the first deliveries coincide with the holidays. Right now in late winter and early spring, stored harvests are still being shipped since Boyette Brothers Produce maintains year-round production.

This is a prime time of year to use organic sweet potatoes in baking desserts. Spring and summer sweet crops like strawberries and blueberries are still several weeks away, so opting for sweet potatoes in late winter helps support the natural farming cycle-and aids in celebrating National Cook a Sweet Potato Day on February 22nd!

Since our family farm has easy access to sweet potatoes we've adapted many recipes, and we actually use sweet potatoes in desserts all year long. Instead of carrot cake, we often grate sweet potatoes and substitute them for carrots. We also skip pumpkin breads and instead sub in pureed sweet potatoes. If making a pie crust intimidates you—these may be better options for you!

With Valentine's Day ahead we're also sharing a few tips to customize this sweet potato pie dessert for your sweetheart:

• Custom pie dish. Opt for a heart-shaped pie dish and let the shape speak for itself. This dish fits in on Valentine's Day or any anniversary or special occasion.
• Pastry cutouts. For basic decoration using pie crust, prepare additional pastry dough, roll out, and use a heart-shaped cutout to create pastry cutouts. Williams-Sonoma offers festive messages on their Valentine's Day stamps. Use the cut outs as a border on the sweet potato pie, or a solitary heart in the center as the focal point.
• Gluten-free love. If you or your Valentine have a gluten allergy, substitute the crust with a store-bought gluten-free pie crust or create your own using gluten-free flours. Another option is to buy gluten-free cookies (vanilla, chocolate, ginger, or graham crackers depending on your flavor preference), and create a pie crust by subbing the crushed cookies in lieu of the flour in the recipe.

Sweet Potato Pie with Raspberry Sauce

[click image for PDF of recipe]