My first idea with this recipe was simply to try and make a sweet potato burger from scratch. I’ve made a few burgers by now, I love sweet potatoes, and I had plenty of ingredients on hand. What could possibly go wrong? Well, a lot, as it turned out. Rather than burgers, I made something which had a very strange consistency. After eating the whole batch, we agreed that they were more closely related to scones, which was a little dent in my cooking ego. Though they were delicious, I have thus far refused to make them again, due to J’s constant insistence that he “would like to have those scones again”. Here’s how I made them.

Ingredients:

• 2 medium sweet potatoes
• 3 tablespoons agave nectar
• Around 100g sundried tomatoes
• 1/2 red onion
• 1 medium egg
• 8-10 tablespoons flour
• 4 teaspoons BBQ spice mix
• 4 teaspoons pasta spice mix

First of all, I softened up the sweet potatoes by boiling them in water and agave nectar. They went in the blender along with the sundried tomatoes, onion, egg, and spices. As I blended the mixture, it became clear that the mixture was far too wet. There was no way it was going to hold into burger shapes. So the solution was the make it less wet – and adding flour would do that, right? After adding somewhere between eight and ten tablespoons (I lost track), I finally had to concede defeat. The mixture still was not enough to shape into solid lumps of burger, but there was so much flour in it already that I was halfway to making bread. In the end, I shaped it into burgers and then put it into the oven until it was looking more solid and the colour had improved to a more golden shade.

As I mentioned earlier, they were actually really tasty. They had the same kind of consistency of a scone, although perhaps a slightly denser one, with the sweet potato flavour. They were a little chewy but very filling. They definitely had a moreish quality to them, and I could actually quite happily make and eat them again. They were hearty, and went well on their own as well as accompanied by elements like avocado and mayonnaise. I perhaps would recommend not bothering with a bread bun, because they are doughy enough not to need one. I would probably describe them as a more Italian take on a scone, with the flavourings from the sundried tomatoes and pasta spices.