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Is there a way or technique to make mashed sweet potatoes less stringy?

Does it just come down to potato selection or can it be improved by a technique?

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I believe (although I am not sure) that the majority of the stringiness of mashed sweet potatoes comes from the fibrous parts of the potato that are near the skin. If when you remove the skin, you remove a bit of the flesh as well, it should solve your problem.

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    The ends also tend to be stringier, I think.
    – Cascabel
    Sep 4, 2011 at 18:43
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I peel and cook sweet potatoes with butter or oleo in a crock pot, about a half pound for 6-8 pounds of sweet potatoes, then use an electric mixer to pull out most of the strings - mix for a few minutes, lift up the mixer to spin off the sweet potatoes, turn it off and wash the strings off. Do that until only a small amount of strings are collected. Then to make it essentially string free, push the hot sweet potatoes through a good quality kitchen sieve with the back of a large spoon.

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After cooking the sweet potatoes run them through a ricer.

Whether you use a big ricer or a little ricer the process will convert the softened 'meat' of the sweet potato into a consistently sized pellet, about the size of a grain of rice, that can then be seasoned and whipped to smooth consistency. (I also add a bit of honey, butter and brown sugar...but that is approaching a 'recipe')

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Boil them chopped into large portions - skin on with a slit in the skin for easy peel back. The fibrous areas pull away from the ‘meat’ along with the skin. Much easier than peeling before boiling plus the quality is much improved due to the fibrous bits coming off with the skin once boiled.

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It might come down to technique.

I've had good luck with baking sweet potatoes whole (unpeeled), and then mashing them. But because I know the strands tend to run along the long axis, I cut it into sections (about 1cm / 1/2" thick) across that axis before mashing.

They're soft enough at that point that I just use a metal spatula to chop them up, and then take a potato masher to them.

And I sometimes do them as 'smashed' potatoes, and leave the skins on, which would mask any stringiness, but I scrub them well before hand, and still cut across the potato before mashing so the skin is in smaller chunks.

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