Every Thanksgiving dinner menu needs some awesome sides, and one of those dishes needs to be potatoes. It’s a must, but there are a lot of options. Mashed potatoes are pretty standard around here, but I decided to switch it up this year. I decided to go with sweet potatoes when I came across this Bourbon Sweet Potato Casserole with Sweet ‘n’ Savory Bacon Pecans recipe. I know, it’s a long name, but that name is chock full of wonderful things. Let’s find out if this sweet potato casserole tastes as good as it sounds!
The classic sweet potato casserole we know and love, but topped with sweet and savory bacon pecans.
The Ingredients
As the name implies, there are quite a few ingredients in this recipe. None of them were hard to find or expensive, though. As usual, I did have a few things on hand like the bourbon, vanilla extract, spices, flour, and eggs.
I hit up my usual grocery store for most everything else. I could have gotten the bacon from there too, but I decided to get it at Wild Fork (where I bought my turkey). Their Applewood Smoked Berkshire Thick Uncured Bacon was the only thick-cut bacon they had, but I was very happy with it.
The Process
This Bourbon Sweet Potato Casserole can be made up to two days ahead, so that’s exactly what I did. Make-ahead Thanksgiving dishes are wonderful! Spreading the work over a few days saves me every year. Here’s how my tie was spent on this recipe:
- 1 hour to bake the potatoes
- 29 minutes to prep
- 35 minutes to cook
- 2 hours 4 minutes total
That was a little more than the 1 hour 50 minutes listed, but not by much.
Prepping the Sweet Potato Casserole
Baking the sweet potatoes for an hour kicked things off. Then I cut them in half and set them aside to cool while I prepped the pecan topping. Cooking the bacon is the first step here, and I made sure mine was extra crispy.
While the bacon drained, I mixed up the rest of the ingredients in a mixing bowl. Then I chopped the drained bacon and added it to the mix.
The potatoes were cooled by the time the topping was done, so I peeled the skins away and mashed them up. Like the topping, the next step was to mix in the rest of the ingredients.
With the filling and topping done, I moved on to the assembly. I spooned the mashed sweet potatoes into a baking dish and topped them with the pecan-bacon mixture. Then I wrapped the dish with a couple of layers of plastic wrap and popped it into the refrigerator.
Cooking the Sweet Potato Casserole
On the day of dinner, this was the easiest dish to prepare. Well, next to the cranberry sauce, but all I had to do was take that out of the refrigerator! okay, I did have to wait 11 minutes for my oven to preheat and unwrap the dish, but that’s not exactly difficult.
Then it was into the oven to bake for 35 minutes, and I worked on prepping the Bacon Wrapped Sausage Stuffing while the casserole cooked. Once it was done, I transferred it to my oven’s warmer drawer until dinner was ready to serve. It was piping hot, and the topping was nice and crunchy.
