Never confuse yams and sweet potatoes again.
| Channel | Publish Date | Thumbnail & View Count | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|
 Channels Television | 2012-05-15 17:21:34 |  29,255 Views |
Things You Should Know About Yam
Elazar Sontag is a writer from Oakland California living in Brooklyn. He is a contributor to the Washington Post New York Magazine Vice and more.
Knobby and brown with small thin hair-like roots that sprout randomly yams aren’t exactly the most glamorous of foods. But if you can get past their somewhat odd appearance you might just fall in love. That is if you ever come across an actual yam. Unless you do most of your grocery shopping at African Caribbean or Asian markets or grew up eating and cooking them chances are that when you think of “yam” you simply imagine an orange sweet potato.
As I did a bit of research in my sweet potato field guide – way too many puns here I know – the custom of calling sweet potatoes yams began in the early 20th century when southern farmers introduced softer-fleshed orange sweet potatoes to the American market. Farmers called the orange tubers yams to distinguish them from the white-fleshed sweet potatoes people were already familiar with. The name stuck and all these years later a large percentage of us still couldn’t point out a true yam in a row. And that’s a shame because their flavor and texture are completely unique and they respond well to a variety of cooking methods and seasonings. A true yam is much starchier than a sweet potato with a milder sweetness that only becomes slightly more pronounced when the root is cooked.
