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The most common varieties in the U. Let this not-at-all-exhaustive guide act as a doorway into the vast and incredible world of Ipomoea batatas that's science for "sweet potatoes". Though many grocers use the terms "yam" and "sweet potato" interchangeably, the two are far from the same. Unless you live in a tropical climate, or are cooking dishes that specifically call for them, you probably aren't encountering yams at all. Real yams are native to Asia and Africa, and have scaly brown skin surrounding very starchy white flesh.
On the bright side, this means you're highly unlikely to accidentally purchase a yam at your local supermarket. Instead, you'll find plenty of sweet potato varieties mislabeled as yams. That's thanks to early 20th-century Southern farmers, who began using "yam" to refer to the newer, orange-fleshed varieties of sweet potatoes they were cultivating, as a way to differentiate their product from the white-fleshed sweet potatoes Americans were already familiar with.
It's not always easy to tell varieties of orange sweet potatoes apart. So to get a little more clarity about the differences between some of the most common orange tubers, I checked in with Keia Mastrianni , a North Carolina—based writer and oral historian.
Keia is the Deputy Editor of Crop Stories , a food magazine telling the stories of farming in the agricultural South. The magazine's most recent issue was exclusively dedicated to sweet potatoes. Keia explained that all three of the popular orange varieties I'd decided to include in this guide were designed first and foremost with production in mind. This is the most common sweet potato variety in American grocery stores, and the one you'll find at pretty much every market. If you see a bin simply labeled "sweet potatoes" it's likely you're either buying Beauregards or jewels we'll get to those in a moment.
Beauregards have purplish-red skin and a deep orange interior. Their flesh is slightly stringier and more juicy than some other varieties when cooked, so they're good for mashing and incorporating into baked goods and desserts. Try using this variety in our recipes for candied yams or, more accurately, candied sweet potatoes , miso-scallion roasted sweet potatoes , and sweet potato biscuits.
Beauregards will break down slightly when cooked, and when roasted, while they'll still hold their shape, they don't maintain the same chewy bite that other varieties do. Grocery stores used to be so simple to me. We are out of food? I will get food! I could walk in with confidence, consult my list, fill my cart, and push my way to the check out stand without a single, solitary dilemma.
Now I feel like I have to make a hundred different decisions. The humble potato should be simple, right? Oh, so wrong. The whole yam vs. Mostly frustrating. Different stores and growers label them different ways. Different parts of the country and therefore recipes call them different things. I was determined to get to the bottom of this.
So I sat down to do some focused research aka Googling around while eating a bowl of ice cream and watching The Crown. Here are four tubers, a colorful mixture labeled as yams and sweet potatoes, available at my friendly New Seasons grocery store. However, both are from the same botanical family. The flesh of a sweet potato can be white, orange, or purple. While labeled yams, they are actually sweet potatoes and are even more common than the standard white-fleshed sweet potato.
These varieties are a low-calorie, nutrient-dense food, packed with vitamin-A more than carrots! Sweet potatoes also contain high amounts of calcium, fiber, iron, and vitamin-E. Sweet Potatoes — Same botanical group, different color. They are also long with tapered ends but have a light tan skin and a yellow interior, similar in color to a Yukon gold potato.
They are a bit drier, starchier, and less sweet than their orange relatives. Many grocery stores carry three varieties of sweet potatoes: Beauregards, Jewels, and Red Garnets. To see if we could detect any differences among the three, we tasted them in a simple mash as well as in a recipe for sweet potato biscuits.
Beauregards, the most common variety, made great biscuits—buttery-sweet and fluffy—and were tasty, albeit one-dimensionally sweet, as a plain mash. The flesh of the Jewels was less sweet than the Beauregards but with an equally firm texture. Red Garnets, decidedly more savory than the others, had an earthiness that tasters appreciated in the mash.
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