Name: Oven Baked Sweet Potato Fries with Chimichurri Sauce
Prep time: 10 min
Cook time: 10 min
Total time: 20 min
Yield: 4
Ingredients: 2-3 large sweet potatoes (washed and cut into wedges); 2 tbs parsley; 2 tbs cilantro; 1 clove garlic; 2 tbs. red onion (coarsely chopped); 1/4 tsp red pepper flakes; 1/4 tsp salt; 11/2 tbs. olive oil; 3 tbs. water

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Oven Baked Sweet Potato Fries with chimichurri sauce has got to be one of my favorite new creations. I’ve always loved Mexican flavors with sweet potatoes. I love to have sweet potato and black beans burgers and chili stuffed sweet potatoes, the flavors just pair so well together. I cannot get enough of these oven baked sweet potato fries, they are one of my favorite side dishes. Besides being healthy, they are also so easy to make, and very budget friendly. I mean really, who doesn’t love sweet potato fries!

Normally I like to make guacamole to go with sweet potato fries, especially if I’m serving them with a Mexican inspired black bean burgers. This combination came out of me having an intense craving for something different, and I noticed I had a ton of fresh parsley and cilantro in the fridge that needed to be used. So Chimichurri sauce was a way to kill two birds with one stone.

I have made this sauce before as a marinade for shrimp and fish, its so flavorful and could not be easier to throw together. When making the chimichurri sauce, the amount of garlic and red pepper flakes you want to add is totally up to you. Raw garlic tends to be quite pungent and while I ended up using two small cloves, I think most people would be happy with the result using only one clove of garlic, so that’s how I wrote the recipe.

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I love to buy fresh herbs, especially parsley, cilantro, and basil. What I’ve found is that until my summer garden is growing, I end up feeling like I waste a lot more than I use. So I have started making recipes like the Chimichurri sauce/marinade as a way to utilize those fresh herbs. There’s nothing worse than wasting produce and it really is a money-saving tip if you can learn how to utilize all of the produce you buy every week. Not sure what else to do with fresh parsley? You can make cauliflower tabbouleh to freshen up homemade marinara or top your zucchini pizza. Cilantro is great in Mexican dishes. Try it in pineapple coleslaw or black bean veggie burgers

Oven Baked Sweet Potato Fries Recipe Tips

The chimichurri sauce is made in the blender. I actually used my single serve blender (affiliate link) cup to make cleanup even easier. I love using the blender since you don’t have to finely chop any of the herbs or garlic, you just have to rough chop onion and the garlic so you don’t have big chunks of anything in your final product.

Sweet potato fries are so easy to make. The key is to have a really sharp chefs knife (affiliate link) and work with flat surfaces. If you aren’t confident with your knife skills, I would suggest that once the sweet potato has been cut in half down the middle, to cut it again long wise, and then stand it up on the flat bottom. From here, you can just make wedges from the top down so you can always see what you’re doing; but you have a more stable surface to work with.

You can always use the tip from my buddy Bobby Flay and precook the potatoes a little bit in the microwave (four minutes or so) just to start the cooking process. This would cut down on the cooking time and they would also be easier to cut, since they would be softer. But really since these are so thin, they don’t take that long in the oven.

I like to keep my fries on the thinner side, that way they cook up quicker and the end product ends up being much crispier. I’ve found that thick fries tend to stay pretty soft in the center, even though they are crispy on the outside, which isn’t my favorite.