And when it comes to recipe ideas, the possibilities are endless: Try sweet potato fries, mashed sweet potatoes, roasted sweet potatoes, or loaded baked sweet potatoes (to name a few). Their flesh can vary in color from white to red to purple. Purple sweet potatoes tend to be denser than other types, but turn rich, starchy and nutty when cooked (some even say wine-like). 90.07g vs 77.28g; 1.63x more dietary fiber per 100g? Although they are both root vegetables, they belong to two different plant families--the sweet potato is from the morning glory family while the yam is related to the lily. Nevertheless, most orange sweet potatoes are interchangeable in cooking and baking. Yams are sweeter than the sweet potato, grow much larger and are also nutritionally inferior. Yams grow from a regular potato size to gigantic proportions of nearly 5 feet long! But back then, the sweet potato was also white or yellow in color. They cook very differently. They can also be processed into yam flour or pounded to make yam. They look pretty much the same to me, is it the same kind of sweet potatoe, just … Aren’t they beautiful? instagram Dice, … If the sweet potato is a suburban mom with waxed legs and a tan, the yam is a seasoned Harley rider with a ZZ top beard. Korean Sweet Potatoes. The skin of a true yam is tougher and bark like and the flesh is white, red or purplish in color. The skin of a yam (left) looks kind of like tree bark, while a sweet potato (right) is more reddish-brown. Use them: Arugula, Fig and Fried White Sweet Potato Salad. To know what you want to buy when faced with a sweet potato and a sweet potato yam in the grocery store, it is important to know what you want to prepare. Please read my disclosure policy. You will 99% of the time, unless in large city produce buying, NEVER SEE A TRUE YAM! ; Shaped like a potato or a longer tapered potato. So now that I accidentally ended up with the wrong kind of sweet potato, I came up with this sweet, smokey and slightly spicy variation on home fries. How did this happen? RELATED: The 23 Best Sweet Potato Recipes You Need in Your Life. The key ingredient of your favorite fries, autumn pie and go-to work lunch. After Columbus' discoveries, they were brought to Asia, and varieties with white skin and speckled pale purple flesh were developed on the Japanese island of Okinawa. They may look like regular spuds on the inside, but their outer flesh and oblong shape are a giveaway. The other has a copper skin with an orange flesh that is sweet and soft (this is the kind you’re probably used to eating). They’re native to Central and South America but are now primarily grown in North Carolina. 1.8g vs 4.18g; 1.77x more vitamin E (alpha-tocopherol) per 100g Aside from the shape, these are two very different veggies. You can unsubscribe anytime by clicking the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of emails you receive. It differs greatly from the sweetpotato in taste, texture, appearance and family. Home cooked Meals for every occasion. A look at how Sweet Potatoes make their way to the grocery store.Visit http://tinyurl.com/ycyteyo to see the rest of America's Heartland: Episode 515. Thank you for the sweet potato & yam info. One of my favorite comfort food — or vegetable, actually — is the Korean sweet potato, goguma. Thanks to your breakdown, I ended up picking the okinawan variety. Yam Yam (credit: Kim Nguyen) Yams are root vegetables with a deep brown almost bark-like skin. This explains why we (mistakenly) label one as a sweet potato and one as a yam. They will give you the texture that you want! Sweet potatoes are also a trendy diet food. They’re dry and starchy rather than sweet but can be prepared in essentially all the same ways as sweet potatoes, from roasting to frying. Often, the copper skinned sweet potato is referred to as yam, or sweet potato yam, and these are a firmer version of sweet potatoes. Yams are native to Asia and Africa, they are related to lilies and grow as roots of a flowering plant. Your email address will not be published. They cook very differently. Korean sweet potatoes are some of the best examples of these Asian vegetables. Yams and sweet potatoes are actually different species and not from the same family. Sweet Potatoes and Yams might be some of the most commonly confused root vegetables of all time. Check out this side by side nutritional comparison of the yam and the sweet potato: Sweet potato, 1/2 cup (100 grams), baked with skin ( 4 ): 90 calories, 0 grams fat, 20 grams carbohydrate, 3.3 grams fibre, 2 grams protein, 475 milligrams potassium, 20 milligrams vitamin C, 0.28 milligrams vitamin B6, 11.5 milligrams beta-carotene. The sweet potatoes with the lighter skin and yellow insides are softer. During the sweet potato diet, you can eat sweet potatoes every day for each meal. Subscribe to receive weekly recipes and get a FREE Bonus e-book: Quick & Easy Weeknight Meals! Often North Americans use the words “yam” & “sweet potato” interchangeably. My greatest passion is creating in the kitchen and making deliciously comforting recipes! Many types of sweet potato from Asia have dark-colored skin and white flesh. Yams are rough, scaly, difficult to peel and very low in beta-carotene. Are you sure you want to remove this item from your Recipe Box? Yams and sweet potatoes have differences in both appearance, taste and origin. I ended up using Korean sweet potato, which are similar, and they had the same fluffy texture. [Video: Serious Eats and Sunny Lee; Photographs: Vicky Wasik] If your side dish recipe rotation is feeling a little tired, then this take on gamja bokkeum, a Korean stir-fried potato banchan, is just what you need to get out of that rut.. We start by quickly shallow-frying small Yukon Gold potatoes until they're lightly golden brown. Her greatest passion is creating in the kitchen and making deliciously comforting recipes for the everyday home cook! There are also purple sweet potatoes and other varieties. Sign up for PureWow to get more daily discoveries sent straight to your inbox. There are times when I visit the produce aisle of the grocery store to find they offer bins of both sweet potatoes and yams but both bins contain the same vegetable! To easily identify which of these tuberous root vegetables you want to buy, take note of the skin. Know all the differences between these tuberous root vegetables. Holly is a wine and cheese lover, recipe creator, shopping enthusiast and self appointed foodie.