People Are Using This Secret Ingredient for Sweet Potato Pie​

The desserts that grace your table this Thanksgiving depend on where in the country you live. For many families, pumpkin pie and apple pie are the go-to after-dinner options, but in the southern states, sweet potato pie is a holiday staple. There’s one secret ingredient for sweet potato pie that will elevate your Thanksgiving dessert spread.

What is the secret ingredient?

The typical sweet potato pie recipe is simple: cooked and mashed sweet potatoes, milk or cream, eggs, sugar, spices (cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger), and sometimes butter. These are all blended until smooth and placed in an open-topped pie crust for baking.

As platforms like Instagram and TikTok make it easier for people to share their own family recipes, however, it’s clear that another ingredient often makes the cut: citrus, either in the form of orange juice, lemon juice, a combination of both or orange zest.

@kimmyskreations The sweet potato pie is sweet potatoing!!!!!!!!! I like mine sweet and cold LIKE ME! #kimmyskreations #sweetpotatopie ♬ original sound – KimmyKreations

There are many ways to tweak a sweet potato pie, and a bit of citrus is becoming increasingly embraced—but it’s certainly not a new baking tip. According to the /Old_Recipes subreddit, lemon has appeared in sweet potato pie recipes for over a century.

Why does it make pies better?

As Camirra Williamson of Camirra’s Kitchen notes in her sweet potato pie tutorial, adding a bit of lemon juice (between 1 and 1 1/2 teaspoons) can bring out the flavor of sweet potatoes so they aren’t entirely masked by the warm spices. It’s important not to add too much, though; otherwise, the lemon juice will assert its own flavor and ruin the effect.

J. Kenji Lopez-Alt has said that if a recipe tastes like it’s missing something, it’s not necessarily that it’s been underseasoned; it just needs acid. You can add all the cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and allspice to a pie as you like, but a bit of acid will really bring all those flavors together.

Other TikTok users similarly insist that the juice of half an orange and half a lemon, while non-traditional, “takes the recipe up a notch” and “brings back the brightness” to contrast with the rich, buttery flavors of the filling.

Remember, seeing lemon juice or lemon extract in a recipe doesn’t signal that the dessert will taste like that ingredient, but rather that ingredient will make all the flavors sing. After all, your chocolate chip cookies don’t taste “eggy,” do they?