Roasted Sweet Potatoes

The best roasted sweet potatoes are seasoned with salt and garlic powder, then baked in a hot oven until caramelized. Perfection!

All hail the sweet potato! This tender orange vegetable is super versatile, baked into crispy fries, with Mexican toppings, or as part of a Moroccan stew. When Alex and I first started cooking healthy food together in our first kitchen years ago, we realized this veggie didn’t have to be stuffed with the traditional marshmallows to taste amazing. Since then we’ve amassed quite the collection of sweet potato recipes. But our favorite way to make them? As roasted sweet potatoes, a basic side dish that goes with just about anything. Here’s our standard method, and our trick for a little flavor flair.

How to make roasted sweet potatoes: a tutorial

Our hope is that you wouldn’t even need a recipe for making roasted sweet potatoes! Once you understand the concept behind it, you can free form it a bit. If you’ve never roasted sweet potatoes, make these exactly as written the first time, just to get a feel for the amounts of flavoring. But to be honest: Alex and I follow this recipe every time, because we love how consistent it is! It’s easy to memorize too.

Step 1: Dice the sweet potato into 3/4-inch chunks.

This might sound oddly specific, but we’ve found that a 3/4-inch dice is the best size for roasted sweet potatoes. If you were in our kitchen, we’d just show you the size of pieces of course! Cutting a 1/2-inch dice doesn’t feel like substantial enough bites, and 1-inch are rather large and take longer. So 3/4-inch is perfect! (Trust us.)

Step 2: Mix with olive oil, salt, and garlic powder.

Here’s our flavor secret: adding a bit of garlic powder takes these sweet potatoes over the top! It doesn’t taste garlicky either: just like savory, roasty goodness. To the mix you’ll also add olive oil and kosher salt. To add the flavor to 2 pounds of sweet potatoes (about 4 medium), we’ve found the right ratios are 2 tablespoons olive oil and 1 teaspoon each kosher salt and garlic powder.

Tip: We love making recipes easy to memorize, so that’s another reason why the quantities are simple! 2 pounds sweet potatoes, 2 T olive oil, 1 t each garlic powder and kosher salt.

Step 3: Bake at 450 degrees for 25 minutes.

Throw those sweet potatoes onto a parchment paper lined baking sheet, and roast away! One of our favorite innovations is you don’t even need to stir: just leave the potatoes as is and they’ll get beautifully caramelized on the bottom. Remove from the oven and enjoy!

10 ways to serve roasted sweet potatoes

The most basic way to serve these roasted sweet potatoes is as a side dish. They work equally as well for weeknight meals or for holidays like Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner. But get a little more creative, and they’re just as good in a taco or part of a bowl meal! Here are the best ways we’ve found to serve roasted sweet potatoes:

Salmon. Serve as a side to baked salmon, broiled salmon or teriyaki salmon.
Meatloaf. Try with our vegetarian meatloaf.
In a taco. Try with crunchy slaw, refried beans, salsa, and sour cream swirled with hot sauce (or cilantro sauce).
Shrimp. Serve stovetop shrimp or grilled shrimp.
In a grain bowl. A few concepts to model: roasted vegetable bowl or Southwest salad bowl.
Salad. Make a salad without a recipe: greens, pepitas, goat cheese crumbles, and balsamic vinaigrette.
BBQ sandwich. Try alongside our Jackfruit BBQ Sandwich.
Seared tuna bowl. Make our 5 minute seared tuna and to a rice bowl.
Yum Yum sauce. Top with Yum Yum sauce to make an irresistible side.
With an egg. Top a bowl with an egg, and you’ve got a savory breakfast.

More sweet potato recipes

These roasted sweet potatoes are perfect for easy sides and components of tacos and bowl meals. But there are so many more ways to eat this tasty and healthy veggie! Here are some of Alex and my favorite ways:

Baked Sweet Potato Here’s our basic method for roasting it: with a time-saving trick! Then load them up Thai-style, Moroccan-style, or Mexican-style.
Crispy Sweet Potato Fries What’s tastier than sweet potato fries? Here’s our trick for getting them crispy in the oven…
Sweet Potato Hash Browns These hash browns are easy to make and oven baked: perfect for brunch!

This Baked Sweet Potato features a time-saving trick!

This roasted sweet potatoes recipe is…

Vegetarian, gluten-free, vegan, plant-based, and dairy free.