Homemade Purple Sweet Potato Powder (自制紫薯粉)

“You need nothing else, but only the sweet potato for this. With my quick and easy recipe, it’s definitely a breeze to get it done without hassle.”

Yes, 1-ingredient recipe and less than 1 hour of your precious time, is what you need for the homemade ground sweet potato. This sweet potato powder is, basically, great to add into cake baking, bread making, kueh (chinese cake), snacks, and hot beverages. Yes, anything you like it with sweet potato. Oh, my favorite hot beverage, Sweet Potato “Latte” (Steaming hot milk with sweet potato powder). :)

Yields about 100g of powder
3 large purple flesh Japanese sweet potatoes (about 500g)

Method
(1) Peel sweet potatoes and slice thinly (about 1mm). Soak in salted water for about 10 minutes. Drain and pat completely dry.

(2) Preheat air fryer to 150deg Celsius or oven to 180deg Celsius. Place sweet potato slices in the mesh basket/ baking tray, spread them over and do not over stack. Bake for 10 minutes. Then reduce to 80deg Celsius (150deg Celsius for oven) and bake for another 30 minutes, or until each slice turns completely crisped and dry. Loosen the slices occasionally as it bakes.

(3) Break the crisped slices apart, and place in grinding mill to grind into powder. Do it in batches, if grinding mill has small capacity. Store in sterilized airtight container and place in cool dry place.

Health Notes
Sweet Potato: Considerably the healthiest food. Purple sweet potato is huge in antioxidant capacity which fights against free radical in body, making us strong, youthful and lowering risk of getting cancer.

Sweet potato is a good carbohydrate provider that regulate blood sugar (glucose) and relatively lower in Glycemic Index (GI), especially boiled type, that means the food consumed will be digested and converted into energy slower. This way, the energy can be used up by the body instead of storing as fat in the body.

All the energy boosting Vitamin Bs, flu fighting Vitamin C, good cell growth, immunity, skin and eyes caring Vitamin A, and other great minerals e.g. Manganese (for healthy bones structure), Copper (for beautiful skin), potassium (for muscle recovery), and etc, are also found rich in sweet potatoes.

1 tablespoon of sweet potato powder counts about 60kcal.

Tips: It lasts for 1-2 months, with proper storage.
* Any type of sweet potatoes is fine to use, just that purple flesh looks nicer and taste sweeter than the yellow and orange kinds. Also, yellow and orange fleshes tends to burn easily.
* I used knife to slice the sweet potato to create some thickness in it. If you are using peeler to slice until paper thin slices, the length of baking time and temperature have to be adjusted. Thinner the slices, lower the temperature and shorter time needed.
* Different hearing device works differently. Oven tends to require higher temp and longer baking duration than air fryer. In fact, different brands and models of oven/ air fryer make the difference, too. Hence, always try out with minimal and most confident setting first. Then adjust as it goes.
* Mixer grinder, grinding mill or goblet/ jug blender, either can be used to grind the crisped hard slices. Grind and pause motions are essential during the long grinding process, for most types of blender. You don’t want to spoil your blender for just once. :)
* As the sweet potato slices are so hard and dry, take note of the flying sweet potato dust as you grind. Wait for the powder to subside before removing the lid to pour out from the blender.