A Few Sweet Potatoes

About author / Victoria Wesseler

Healthy eating advocate; master gardener; local food expert. Even veggie haters love her recipes.

I like to say “what if” and “why not” when I cook. The same curiosity and abandon often apply to choosing plants for our gardens. So, every year we plant one or two different vegetables or fruits just to see how they’ll grow in our climate and what kind of yield we’ll have with them. This year we experimented with Asian melons and sweet potatoes.

The Asian melons started out beautifully. The seeds quickly developed into big plants with lots of fruit on them. My friend Lan told me that they would be delicious and I promised to share the harvest with her. But, at the peak of harvest season, I still can’t tell you what they taste like and Lan has yet to see a melon being delivered to her house. The melons would reach a nearly perfect ripened stage and then they would disappear at night. Just vanish. Without a trace. We can’t figure out what form of wildlife was so partial to those melons. There was nothing left on the garden floor that would help us identify the culprit who neatly, silently, and repeatedly stole the fruit. What happened to the melons remains a mystery to us.

But what we lacked in melons was more than made up for by what we harvested from the sweet potato plants. When we were at the garden shop this spring my husband suggested that we try growing “a few” sweet potato plants. He bought a flat of 25 slips. “A few” to me is three or four. To my husband, apparently it’s 25. Each plant produced 5-6 sweet potatoes. You do the math. Good thing our neighbors like sweet potatoes as much as we do.

Unfortunately, the sweet potato is plagued with identity problems. First of all, it is not a potato. It is an edible enlarged storage root that is a member of the morning glory family. It is native to Central America and Peru. And it is not a yam. A “true” yam, which can be several feet in length and weigh over a hundred pounds when harvested, is native to Africa. Yams need a very long growing season and only grow in tropical climates, unlike the sweet potato which thrives in many climate zones. The confusion over the name is attributed to the use of the term yam interchangeably with sweet potato, particularly in the South, and the fact that canned sweet potatoes are often mislabeled as yams.

But, there is no confusion when it comes to the nutritional value of this tasty tuber. One 4 ounce sweet potato has 117 calories, 27.5 carbohydrates, 3.4 grams of fiber, 2.0 grams of protein, and is loaded with beta carotene. Despite being called a superfood and receiving the “thumbs up” from nutritionists, sweet potato consumption in the United States has steadily declined from a high of 31 pounds per person in the 1920s to the current 4 pounds per person per year.

Sweet potatoes come in dry flesh and moist flesh varieties. The dry variety is pale yellow in color, not very sweet, and true to its name, the flesh is dry and crumbly. The moist variety is bright orange, sweet, and, as the name implies, has moist creamy textured flesh. There is also a white sweet potato that has a dry flesh but is sweeter than the orange variety. When purchasing sweet potatoes, look for small to medium sized ones with no cuts or bruises on them. Sweet potatoes can be stored in a cool, dry, and dark location for up to 7 days after purchase. Do not put them in the refrigerator.

Many of us only eat sweet potatoes on Thanksgiving and usually they are laced with brown sugar, butter, pecans, maybe a splash or two of bourbon, and nestled under a mound of slightly singed marshmallow topping. I admit that that casserole is a nice holiday treat, but the sweet potato has so much more to offer year round. Sweet potatoes can be baked, roasted, boiled, steamed, mashed, fried, made into chips, and pureed. Microwaved? Never! Vegetable cookbook author Elizabeth Schneider insists that “All sweet potatoes are compromised if not destroyed by the microwave.” With more than a few sweet potatoes to spare, I thought I’d test Ms. Schneider’s advice. I took a five ounce, moist flesh sweet potato, punctured it a few times with a fork, placed it on a paper towel on a microwave-safe dish, and cooked it on high for 4 minutes. I turned the potato over half way through the cooking time. She is 100% correct in using the word “destroyed.” The nuked potato flesh was dry with an unpleasant bitter taste. It was inedible.

Last night we grilled some steaks and I made Spicy Sweet Potato Oven Fries to go along with them. The spicy exterior of the oven roasted sweet potato gave way to a sweet interior that was luscious. I was so busy eating the fries that my steak actually got cold! Now, that’s not a bad endorsement for a misunderstood and often misnamed edible enlarged storage root!

Serves/Makes: 2

• 2 (5 ounce size) sweet potatoes, washed, unpeeled
• 1 tablespoon grapeseed, canola, or olive oil
• 1/2 teaspoon ancho chili powder
• 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt