One of the suggested fillings for Venezuelan arepas is sweet potato, which seems to be typically sliced and then just sautéed on the stovetop until cooked. That takes a while stirring, though, especially if you’re cooking in bulk for a large crowd.
I ended up roasting them instead (toss in olive oil, salt and pepper, spread on a foil-lined sheet pan and roast at 400F in a pre-heated oven for about 15 minutes), which freed up my time to cook other things while they were going — when making large quantities (this is 8 sweet potatoes), roasting is a huge boon to efficiency.
One of the things I learned when working on the Sri Lankan cookbooks is that relatively few of our dishes involve roasting, which makes sense if you think about it — in a tropical country, even if you had an oven (which a lot of village folks didn’t, I suspect), you wouldn’t want to run it at high heat for very long! So pan-frying makes sense.
And the result is a little different, of course, so I can’t claim this is completely authentic to Venezuelan cuisine, but hopefully it’s close enough for happy taste buds. I thought it was delicious, and a really excellent pairing for the pulled pork. My kids still don’t like sweet potatoes, which bewilders me — I’ll convert them someday, though!
