If it weren’t for TikTok, we might not know the lunch fixations of strangers across the country, or get to try them out for ourselves.
TikTok creator Courtney Cook (@courtneylcook) is a teacher based in Fayetteville, Georgia, who’s been delighting us lately with her joyful approach to food.
She often shares her meals at work and home online, and recently went viral for her two-ingredient lunch stuffing cheese into a sweet potato.
I know what you’re thinking: Sweet potato and cheese, that’s it? Well, dear reader, there’s a bit more to it than that.
According to Courtney, she takes a sweet potato (either a Japanese sweet potato or a regular-degular orange sweet one) and puts it in the air fryer or oven at 300°F for an hour. Afterward (she says this step is very important!), she lets the sweet potato sit inside the air fryer/oven for three hours, which allows the sweet potato to get “syrupy.”
She then gets a big ‘ol hunk of cheese and stuffs it inside the potato. Courtney has used a few types of cheese in her videos. However, she’s most known for stuffing her potatoes with Butterkäse, a soft, creamy German cheese that literally means “butter cheese.”
Spoiler alert: The People approve.
Recreations of the recipe have popped up everywhere, so much so that people are reporting Butterkäse selling out at Aldi.
The trend even drew the attention of the store’s official TikTok account.
So, I had to find out for myself if this easy lunch is all it’s cracked up to be.
First, I gathered core ingredients. If you can’t find Butterkäse (it’s not widely sold in the US outside of Aldi), you can opt for the easier-to-find harvarti, which has a similar creamy texture. I also used a regular orange sweet potato.
STEP 1: While Courtney doesn’t specify how to prep the potato, I covered the sweet potato in a liberal amount of olive oil and sprinkled it with salt before airfying for an hour.
STEP 2: As instructed, I let the potato sit inside the turned-off air fryer for three hours afterward. Please applaud my patience.
STEP 3: Once the three hours were up, I took it out of the air fryer and pinched off the end of the sweet potato to stick the cheese inside.
STEP 4: And of course, I cut off a healthy chunk of Havarti to fit inside.
STEP 6: Finally, the fun part: stuffing the cheese into the sweet potato (looks just like butter!)
Here’s my honest review: There’s magic in this recipe, and that magic is on the shoulders of the sweet potato. To put it frankly, this was the best-tasting sweet potato I’ve ever had. The flavor was like a buttery mashed sweet potato on Thanksgiving, but without the mashing or the butter. It was delightfully sweet, and while potatoes are notoriously dense, this one was light and creamy, with the skin snapping away from the flesh. I loved it so much that I’ve made this recipe two days in a row.
I’m all for time-saving cooking hacks, but in this instance, I’d highly caution against using the microwave or trying to use a faster preparation method. You simply won’t get the same result.
As for the combination of cheese and sweet potato? It tastes exactly how you think it would — nothing groundbreaking. For me, the main advantage of including the cheese here isn’t for the flavor combination, but to make the lunch more filling. Otherwise, you’d just be rawdogging a handheld sweet potato.
In the future, I’d like to try melting the cheese as some recreations have done. I’d be curious to see what happened if I were to stuff the cheese inside the sweet potato while it’s still hot, directly after cooking, but before sitting for three hours.
On a final note, while the sweet potato is nice and hearty, I also wouldn’t say the recipe is quite filling enough for lunch. I would pair it with a source of protein to last me until dinner.
Would you try this viral two-ingredient lunch? What viral food trend should I review next?
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