Tip - Sweet Potatoes Vs. Yams

Sweet Potatoes vs. Yams

Scan the potato selection in most groceries and you'll probably see a sign for yams 
above coppery-colored, pointy root vegetables. If you then visit an Hispanic or Asian 
market, you'll find a decidedly different vegetable--with dark, rough, scaly skin--
also labeled as a yam. The truth is that the former, the supermarket yam, is not a yam 
at all but a type of sweet potato.


The sweet potato, a member of the morning glory family, is grown around the world, 
although it's indigenous to the Americas and is especially popular in the southern 
United States. According to the North Carolina Sweet Potato Commission, the naming 
confusion began several decades ago when Louisiana farmers developed a new sweet potato 
with dark-orange flesh that cooks up moister and softer than the light-skinned, 
pale-fleshed sweet potatoes that were common at the time. To distinguish this new breed, 
they called it a yam and the name stuck. Today, the USDA requires that these "yams" 
(sometimes called American or Louisiana yams) also be correctly labeled as sweet 
potatoes.

Sweet potatoes range from light brown to reddish pink to deep copper and even purple, 
with interiors that are anything from a dry, pale ivory to a moist, deep orange.

The true yam is an unrelated species that's quite starchy (much more so than the sweet 
potato) and is a staple food for much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. There are many
varieties of yams (also called ņame or igname), ranging from small and potato shaped to 
huge and irregularly shaped (one source claims that they can weigh up to 500 pounds, which 
is why they're sometimes sold in chunks). The somewhat shaggy skin (often peeled before 
cooking) is usually pale to dark brown, and the crisp, dry flesh is white to ivory to 
yellow. Yams, which taste rather bland and are not sweet, can be boiled, baked, or 
fried; they're commonly used in soups and stews.

To add to the confusion, the unrelated boniato is sometimes called a white sweet potato, 
Cuban sweet potato, or batata. Somewhere between an ordinary potato and a sweet potato in 
taste and texture, boniato are sold in Latin markets and used in any way either a sweet 
or white potato is. (The sweet potato, the yam, and the boniato are all unrelated to our 
common potato.)