Baked Sweet Potatoes with Smoky Chipotle and Onions

This recipe sounded so good - and I still buy into the concept of pairing sweet yams/sweet potatoes with the smoky/spice goodness of chipotle chili powder. Unfortunately there are some serious flaws with this recipe.

First problem - estimated time is 45 minutes, but the cooking time (never mind prep) is actually 65 minutes. And for me, to get sweet potatoes that were not crunchy it took another 20 minutes.

The next problem was with the liquid to solid ratio. The recipe claims to be a gratin, but with only 1/2 cup of liquid (which you are instructed to reduce) for a 9 X 11 inch pan, there is no way it can cook properly.

I doubled the amount of liquid, but still produced a very dry dish that took about 2 hours, start to finish. The flavors are good, but it needs SIGNIFICANT changes.

As a final comment - the first step of this recipe is to caramelize the onions (taking 20 minutes), yet the first step of the instructions is to peel and thinly slice 4 large sweet potatoes. This is perhaps trivial, but when you are bumming about the family's dinner being so late, you really wish you'd cut the potatoes while the onions were cooking.

Update: the second day, warmed left overs tasted good. It was dry, but the flavor of sweet potato with chipotle was very good. I think Faith is on to something here, but it needs serious tweaking.