The BEST Air-Fryer Roasted Sweet Potatoes
These are seriously the softest, moistest, and sweetest sweet potatoes ever. As someone who eats roasted sweet potatoes at least once a week, I can confirm that an air fryer produces the most consistent and delicious results. Plus, a secret trick to ensure the sweet potato cooks all the way through makes roasting large sweet potatoes easy.
Ingredients
- Sweet potatoes: Use the freshest sweet potatoes you can get. Right now, they’re in season and haven’t lost their moisture. If they’re harvested at the right time, they should be pretty sweet too. Sometimes, if the potatoes are more starchy than sweet, storing in them in a cool, dry place for about a week can make them sweeter. My favorite varieties are the Okinawa purple sweet potato and the red-skin-yellow-fleshed Japanese sweet potatoes, but common orange sweet potatoes work great too.
- Water: A wet paper towel squeezed over the sweet potatoes partway through cooking is the secret trick! The steam helps the insides of the sweet potato cook without drying out the outside.
After roasting, the best purple sweet potatoes have a super dark purple, almost black color to them and are incredibly soft and moist. The Japanese sweet potatoes turn a stunning caramelized golden-brown on the outside and have a similarly soft texture. Often, there’s sugar coming out through a crack in the skin (delicious to scoop up with a finger) and your fingers feel a little sticky from peeling/eating the sweet potato. A finger-lickingly good sweet potato genuinely brings me so much happiness—try them and you’ll see.
The BEST Air-Fryer Roasted Sweet Potatoes
Course: SidesDifficulty: Easy4
servings (varies)5
minutes40
minutesIngredients
Sweet potatoes, as many as will comfortably fit in your air fryer
Water
Directions
- Rinse/wash the sweet potatoes well, making sure to get all the dirt off (especially if you eat the skin).
- Arrange the sweet potatoes in the air fryer basket so they fit. Set the air fryer to 130 °C/270 °F for 30 minutes.
- After 30 minutes are up, give the sweet potatoes a squeeze in their widest part. If they are already soft, they should be ready to eat! If not, squeeze a wet paper towel over the sweet potatoes, rotate/flip them, and air-fry for another 10-30 minutes, depending on the size and softness of the sweet potatoes. For the best results, after checking that the sweet potatoes are soft, let them sit in the residual heat and steam of the air fryer, which will give any harder parts in the middle to fully cook. Sugar coming out of the skin is a good sign (though not every sweet potato does that).
- Enjoy!
Notes
- If you have tiny sweet potatoes (palm-sized), start with only 20 minutes of roasting, then check on them and use the wet paper towel. Adding additional time takes some experience, so squeezing them for softness is your best bet.
- Sometimes, the sweet potato will still feel a little firm even if you’ve been roasting for almost an hour. If the sweet potato isn’t super big, accept that it probably was a little dried out and eat as is or slice up and pan fry for a different texture.
So quick and easy! My purple sweet potatoes had a lovely concentrated sticky sweetness!