Yes, You Should Grill Sweet Potatoes. Here's How
If you're grilling a ribeye, throwing a potato onto the grill to cook would make for a classic steakhouse pairing. If you're grilling fish, pork, or chicken, though, a sweet potato might make an even tastier side since grilling amplifies the vegetable's natural sweetness. Chef Robbie Shoults, who owns the Marshall, Texas restaurants Bear Creek Smokehouse and High Horse 1898 as well as Marshall Mercantile, assures us that there's really no difference when it comes to cooking the two potato types on a grill. His preferred method for grilling sweet potatoes, he explains, "can be interchanged with regular potatoes."
The process begins with cleaning the tubers: "Make sure to wash and scrub your sweet potatoes," says Shoults. Even though the visible dirt was likely washed off at the processing plant, it's possible that traces of schmutz still remain. After that, he advocates wrapping the potatoes in foil to keep the moisture inside. While baking a potato in foil may cause it to steam inside and yield results that are more mushy than fluffy, the moisture can help protect the food from drying out at a grill's hotter temperatures. If you have a grill with a thermometer, Shoults suggests setting it to 400 degrees Fahrenheit and baking the potato over indirect heat (away from the flame) for 45 minutes to an hour.
You can also chop them up or add flavorings
If you don't want a plain baked potato to accompany your meal, you can always switch things up with some slicing, dicing, and spicing. Grilled sweet potato wedges are an option — our recipe calls for seasoning them with garlic, paprika, and pepper and dipping them in ketchup, but the wedges might be even tastier with Thai peanut sauce. You could also play up the sweet side of the potatoes by sprinkling them with cinnamon sugar and serving them with a side of marshmallow fluff.
The great thing about cutting up your sweet potatoes before grilling is that they won't need quite so long to cook. Our wedges are parboiled first, so they only need about eight minutes of cooking time. If you want to skip this step, you can slice the sweet potatoes into discs like fat potato chips. Half-inch thick ones may need about 20 minutes to cook, while thinner ones could be done even more quickly. Using a grill basket or placing the sliced sweet potatoes on a sheet of foil can help prevent them from falling through the grill grates if this is a concern.