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4 servings Dinner American

Ground Beef Sweet Potatoes with Hot Honey

Air-fried sweet potatoes split and loaded with saucy seasoned ground beef, cottage cheese, avocado, and a sriracha hot honey drizzle.

Ingredients

Sweet potatoes

  • 4 medium sweet potatoes
  • Olive or avocado oil, for rubbing
  • Salt and pepper, to taste
  • Butter, for serving

Ground beef

  • 1 lb ground beef (80/20)
  • 1 tsp minced garlic
  • 1/2 tsp onion powder
  • 1 tsp chili powder
  • 1 tsp paprika
  • 1/2 tsp salt (plus more to taste)
  • 1/2 tsp black pepper
  • 1/2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
  • 1 tsp cornstarch
  • 1/4 cup beef broth

Hot honey

  • 1/4 cup hot honey
  • 1 tbsp sriracha
  • 1/2 to 1 tsp red pepper flakes, to taste
  • 1/2 tbsp vinegar (white or apple cider)

Toppings

  • Cottage cheese, as needed
  • 1 avocado, thinly sliced or mashed

Instructions

Roast the sweet potatoes

  1. Wash and dry sweet potatoes. Pierce each several times with a fork or sharp knife.
  2. Rub with oil, season with salt and pepper.
  3. Air fry at 400°F for 45-50 minutes, flipping after 30 minutes, until fork-tender and skins are crisp.

Cook the ground beef (while potatoes roast)

  1. Heat a dry skillet over medium-high heat — no oil, 80/20 renders plenty of its own fat.
  2. Add ground beef, breaking it up, and cook 6-8 minutes until browned and fat has rendered.
  3. Drain off most of the rendered fat, leaving about a teaspoon in the pan.
  4. Reduce heat to medium. Add minced garlic, sauté 30 seconds until fragrant.
  5. Stir in onion powder, chili powder, paprika, salt, black pepper, and Worcestershire sauce.
  6. Whisk cornstarch into the beef broth first, then pour into the skillet. Simmer 3-5 minutes until sauce thickens and coats the meat. Taste and adjust salt.

Make the hot honey (while potatoes roast)

  1. Whisk together hot honey, sriracha, red pepper flakes, and vinegar. Set aside.

Assembly

  1. Slice open each sweet potato.
  2. Add a pat of butter, season with salt and pepper, mash and fluff the flesh so butter melts in.
  3. Top with a scoop of ground beef.
  4. Add a spoonful of cottage cheese.
  5. Finish with avocado.
  6. Drizzle with hot honey and serve warm.

Nutrition

Per serving — 1/4 of recipe - one potato with toppings.

649 calories Calories
28.8 g Protein
51.1 g Carbs
37.3 g Fat

What's on my plate

Weigh the whole batch once after cooking, then weigh what you actually serve yourself. The macros below are scaled to your portion, not to a nominal serving.

Loaded sweet potatoes raw 1563 g · 2596 kcal batch
Enter both weights to see your macros.
Plate total —

Cooked batch weights are remembered in this browser. Cooking changes weight but not calories, so the batch numbers below stay fixed no matter how much water cooks off or gets absorbed.

Batch reference numbers
ComponentRawCookedkcalProteinCarbsFat
Loaded sweet potatoes 1563 g — 2596 115.2 g 204.4 g 149.2 g

Notes

  • This is the 80/20 ground beef adaptation of a recipe originally made with ground turkey.
  • With beef, skip added oil (it renders its own), drain excess fat, and dial back seasoning since beef carries more inherent flavor than turkey.
  • Garlic goes in after browning the beef, not before — it'll burn otherwise.

How these macros were worked out

These are estimates, not weighed measurements. Each ingredient is priced at its USDA FoodData Central per-100 g value and multiplied by the amount in the recipe - the same method Cronometer uses when it matches your ingredients to its database. Expect a few percent of drift, and more where an ingredient is vague.

  • Cottage cheese and butter are listed "as needed", so this assumes about 1/4 cup of cottage cheese and 1 tsp of butter per potato. Adjust if you use more.
  • The fat figure runs high. Step 3 drains most of the rendered beef fat, but the calculation counts the full 1 lb of 80/20 as eaten. Draining perhaps 2-3 tbsp would cut roughly 250-350 kcal and 30-40 g of fat from the batch.
  • A medium sweet potato is taken as 130 g and a medium avocado as 150 g of flesh.
Ingredient g kcal Protein Carbs Fat
Sweet potatoes, 4 medium 520 447 8.2 g 104.5 g 0.3 g
Oil for rubbing, ~1 tbsp 13.5 119 0 g 0 g 13.5 g
Butter, ~1 tsp per potato 20 143 0.2 g 0 g 16.2 g
Ground beef 80/20, 1 lb 453.6 1152 78 g 0 g 90.7 g
Garlic, 1 tsp minced 3 4 0.2 g 1 g 0 g
Worcestershire, 1/2 tbsp 7.5 6 0 g 1.5 g 0 g
Cornstarch, 1 tsp 2.6 10 0 g 2.4 g 0 g
Beef broth, 1/4 cup 60 2 0.4 g 0.2 g 0.1 g
Hot honey, 1/4 cup 84 255 0.3 g 69.2 g 0 g
Sriracha, 1 tbsp 15 14 0.3 g 2.9 g 0.1 g
Vinegar, 1/2 tbsp 7.5 2 0 g 0.1 g 0 g
Cottage cheese, ~1/4 cup each 226 190 24.9 g 9.7 g 5.2 g
Avocado, 1 medium 150 251 2.9 g 13 g 23.1 g
Batch total 1563 2596 115.2 g 204.4 g 149.2 g
Per serving (/4) 649 28.8 g 51.1 g 37.3 g

Import to Cronometer

This page carries schema.org Recipe data, so Cronometer can pull it in directly. In Cronometer go to Foods → Recipes → Import Recipe from URL and paste:

https://simmonsbrian.com/recipes/ground-beef-sweet-potatoes-hot-honey/

Cronometer matches each ingredient to its own food database and works the nutrition out from that, so review the matches before saving — the numbers on this page are not the ones it imports. Unmeasured seasonings get flagged; delete them.

Weigh the cooked batch once and put it in the Cooked g column of the recipe's ## Components table, and a per-gram import copy is generated at https://simmonsbrian.com/recipes/ground-beef-sweet-potatoes-hot-honey/cronometer/ for logging by weight.