So I can either sound very gullible or very enlightening, but I just learned that sweet potatoes and yams are the same thing! The U.S. government has perpetuated this error by mislabeling, and all this time we thought we were making a choice on two different vegetables. You can see how we’ve all been so confused! Or maybe I was just late to the party…
When most of us think of sweet potatoes, we reference the orange variety. However, the majority of sweet potatoes found in grocery stores are pale and almost yellow in color. Since we’ve been calling the orange type of sweet potatoes “yams” since colonial times, the name caught on to reference that specific variety. It’s like when your teacher misreads your name for attendance, and the whole class thinks you’re Sam Weiners instead of Sam Weyner for the end of time. Poor Sam Weiners.
Anyway, true yams are starchy tubers that have an almost black bark-like skin and white, purple or reddish flesh, found in Africa and Asia. That’s quite different from those canned yams you buy for Thanksgiving!
Did you know that there are 16 varieties of sweet potatoes? The pale type you see in most grocery stores are called Hannahs, and the orange type that we mistake for yams are actually Beauregard sweet potatoes. There’s also Garnets that have a pumpkin-like taste, and Covingtons that are more widely found in the South.
I tried Hannahs for these Parmesan Sweet Potato Tots, and they were delicious!
