Sweet Potato & Rajas Quesadillas
A few Octobers ago I aptly made some pumpkin quesadillas at a Halloween-themed cookout. As good as those were, I'm not a big pumpkin lover, and from start to finish, I just wished that the orange fleshed filler was sweet potato instead. So I decided to give myself what I really wanted and crafted these sweet potato and rajas quesadillas.
That pumpkin quesadilla recipe required roasting and mashing up the pumpkin in order to craft the filling, this time around though I wanted the recipe to be more simple and work using a single batch of coals. So instead of roasting whole sweet potatoes, I decided to cut them into quarter-inch slices which would cook up in about a third of the time it would take to roast an entire spud.
My favorite part of those pumpkin quesadillas were the roasted Anaheim peppers, so I knew I wanted to keep that as part of the equation, but I opted to toss some poblanos into the mix too, which are more commonly what you think of when you see "rajas." Rajas are roasted pepper strips, and to create them, I first completely charred the peppers over a fresh batch of coals, then placed them in a covered bowl to steam and cool down.
While the peppers were resting, I set the sweet potato slices—which I had oiled and seasoned first—on the cool side of a the two-zone fire. I let those roast until they were tender throughout, which took about 20 minutes total.
While the potatoes cooked, there was down time to peel the charred skins off the peppers, then stem and deseed them before cutting them all into thin strips to finish making the rajas.
Once the sweet potatoes were done, I lined a single layers of them on flour tortillas. I then topped the tubers with rajas, pepper jack cheese, and a sprinkling of fresh cilantro. Adding another flour tortilla on top and buttering it up was the last step before it was time to head back out to the grill.
By now the coals had been going for about 40 minutes and were outputting a medium-low heat. This is often when I would choose to replenish them, but it's actually a really great temperature for making quesadillas. Hotter coals will char the tortillas before the cheese can melt, but this low and more even heat was perfect for getting a good browning and crispness to the tortillas while warming the innards perfectly.
Based on my pumpkin quesadilla experience, I knew this sweet potato variation was going to be more to my liking, but I didn't quite know how much I was really going to enjoy it. For me, having those whole slices of sweet potato were more key that I was expecting because I learned that another thing holding me back from full enjoyment of the pumpkin was the mushy texture of the stuffing, which wasn't present here. The sweet potato had a strong presence and then the rajas and pepper jack worked in tandem to provide contrasts with some mellow heat. The rajas made fruitiness part of the equation, and the roasted flavor they also had paired quite well with the sweet spuds. I know a lot of my guests enjoyed both quesadilla variations, but for my money, this is the superior recipe and the one I'm likely to return to again and again.
