Dulce de Batata substitute

Best substitute

Quince paste (dulce de membrillo)

Use the same amount by weight as the dulce de batata you are replacing

Best for pasta frola

Different taste

Quince paste, sold as dulce de membrillo, is the swap Argentine cooks themselves reach for and it slices and bakes exactly the same way, just tarter and more floral. Guava paste is equally firm and easier to find in the US but distinctly tropical. If you want the real mellow sweet-potato flavor, it is genuinely easy to make: roast and mash sweet potato, then cook it down with an equal weight of sugar until a spoon leaves a clean trail.

Other dulce de batata substitutes

Ranked, with the exact amount to use

2Guava paste (goiabada, pasta de guayaba)
Different taste
Use the same amount by weight
Firm Latin American guava preserve sold in blocks and tins.
What changes
Best for
pasta frola, cheese pairing, pastelitos and turnovers, when quince is unavailable
Identical to work with, since it slices, grates and bakes the same way, and it is the easiest of these to find in a US supermarket. The flavor is a much bigger jump: intensely perfumed, tropical and floral, and usually sweeter, so it dominates a tart where dulce de batata sits quietly underneath the pastry. It is superb with salty cheese, which is the other main use for batata paste, so that pairing survives the swap intact.
3Homemade sweet potato paste
Close match
Makes roughly the same weight you started with in sugar plus sweet potato
The actual ingredient, made from scratch in about an hour.
What changes
Best for
pasta frola, cheese boards, getting the true flavor, controlling sweetness
Roast about 2 lb of orange or white sweet potatoes until collapsing, scoop out the flesh, weigh it, and cook it in a heavy pan with an equal weight of sugar, a strip of lemon zest and a squeeze of lemon juice, stirring often over medium-low heat for 30 to 45 minutes until a spoon dragged across the bottom leaves a clean trail that holds. Pour into a lined loaf pan and chill overnight. It will be softer and less rubbery than the commercial block, which uses added pectin or agar, but the flavor is right in a way no substitute is.
4Canned sweet potato or yam, cooked down with sugar
Different texture
One 29 oz can plus 1.5 cups sugar makes about 2 cups paste
The shortcut version of the homemade paste.
What changes
Best for
pasta frola, tart and turnover filling, weeknight substitution
Drain the syrup off well, mash, then cook with sugar and a squeeze of lemon exactly as above. It gets you to the right flavor in 25 minutes instead of an hour and a half. It will never fully set to a sliceable block because canned sweet potato carries more water and less fiber, so treat it as a thick spreadable jam rather than something you cut into slabs. For a lattice tart, stir in a tablespoon of cornstarch to keep it from bubbling over.
5Date paste
Taste and texture differ
Use the same amount by weight
Blended dates, thick, dark and sticky.
What changes
Best for
tart and pastry filling, cookie filling, reduced-sugar baking
Similar sticky density and a similar job as a sweet paste filling, and it has a caramel depth that echoes the molasses side of dulce de batata. It is much darker in both color and flavor, more raisiny than rooty, and it lacks any fruit acidity, so the finished pastry tastes heavier and less refreshing. Brighten it with a teaspoon of lemon juice per cup. Will not slice cleanly.
6Thick apricot jam or apple butter
Taste and texture differ
Use the same amount by volume, thickened
Ordinary supermarket preserves used as a last resort filling.
What changes
Best for
pasta frola, cookie and pastry filling, toast
The honest position: these are not much like dulce de batata. They are looser, more acidic and more obviously fruity, and in a lattice tart they will boil, thin out and run through the gaps. If it is all you have, stir a tablespoon of cornstarch or two tablespoons of fine breadcrumbs into each cup before filling the tart, and bake it a little lower and longer. The result is a decent jam tart, not a pasta frola.

What is Dulce de Batata?

Dulce de Batata is Dulce de batata, also sold as sweet potato paste, batata paste or dulce de boniato, is an Argentine and Uruguayan preserve of sweet potato cooked down with sugar until it sets into a firm block you can slice with a knife.

Cooking tips

The job dulce de batata is doing is firm, sliceable sweetness with a mellow earthy flavor and enough structure to survive an oven. That last part is the trap: any swap that comes out of a jar rather than a block will run out of a lattice tart unless you thicken it, so judge candidates on set as much as on flavor.
For pasta frola, warm the paste with a splash of hot water, orange juice or sweet wine before spreading, about two tablespoons of liquid per cup of paste. Straight out of the block it is too stiff to spread without tearing the pastry base.
Chill it hard before slicing. Dulce de batata cuts cleanly at fridge temperature and smears at room temperature. For grating over a tart or into dough, freeze the block for 20 minutes first and it will shred instead of gumming up the grater.
It is designed to sit against salt. The classic Argentine plate, postre vigilante or queso y dulce, is nothing but a slab of the paste next to a slab of firm salty cheese. Any substitute you use will taste better on a board with a salty fresh cheese than it does alone, and that pairing survives whichever paste you choose.
Once you open a tin or block, wrap it tightly and refrigerate it. The high sugar content keeps it stable for weeks, but the cut surface dries into a hard skin, so press plastic wrap right against the face of it.

Frequently asked questions

Is dulce de batata the same as dulce de membrillo?

No, though they sit side by side in Argentine shops and are used interchangeably. Batata is sweet potato and comes out mellow, earthy and gently sweet with a faint vanilla character. Membrillo is quince, which is tarter, more floral and more assertive. Both set into firm sliceable blocks, so swapping one for the other works mechanically and is completely normal in Argentina, but the tart will taste different.

Can I just leave it out?

Not really, if the recipe is pasta frola, a pastelito or postre vigilante, because the paste is the filling and the dish is essentially pastry plus paste. What you can do is swap in a different firm fruit paste, which is what most of this page is about. If it is a minor component on a cheese board, then yes, skip it and the board is fine.

Can I use mashed sweet potato straight from the oven?

Not as it is. Roasted sweet potato is about 70 percent water and has no set at all, so it will bleed into pastry and steam rather than bake. What turns it into dulce de batata is cooking it down with roughly its own weight in sugar until it thickens enough to hold a trail behind a spoon. That step is what makes it a preserve, and it takes half an hour of stirring.

Where do I buy dulce de batata in the US?

Argentine, Uruguayan and Brazilian grocers carry it in tins or plastic-wrapped blocks, often on the same shelf as membrillo and dulce de leche. Larger Latin American supermarkets sometimes stock it near guava paste. Outside those, it is rare, which is why guava paste tends to be the practical substitute for most people in North America.

Does it contain dairy or gluten?

Traditional dulce de batata is just sweet potato, sugar and usually a setting agent such as pectin or agar, sometimes with vanilla or a little chocolate in the flavored versions, so it is normally free of both. Commercial products vary, so read the label if it matters. The same is true of quince and guava paste, which are also usually just fruit, sugar and pectin.

Related substitutes

More preserves substitutes

Dulce de Batata substitute

Other dulce de batata substitutes

2Guava paste (goiabada, pasta de guayaba)

3Homemade sweet potato paste

4Canned sweet potato or yam, cooked down with sugar

5Date paste

6Thick apricot jam or apple butter