When cooked properly, a sweet potato is delicious. With a
characteristically creamy interior and a nuanced, delicate sweetness,
the sweet potato is the perfect base for both savory meals and mouthwatering desserts.
Here are some of the top mistakes you're making when you cook sweet potatoes.
"Like, you know. It's like a sweet potato."
"Potatoes can be sweet?"
Just like regular potatoes, sweet potatoes are tubers — since the sweet
potato is actually the starchy, fibrous root of a plant, it grows underground,
covered in dirt and soil. While farmers and distributors do their best to get each sweet
potato cleaned up and tidied before they get to grocery stores and farmers markets,
most of the sweet potatoes you buy are likely to have some residual dirt still on the skin.
On top of dirt, your sweet potatoes could have pesticides and other unsavory pieces
of debris on their skins. While it's easy to get lazy and assume that your sweet potatoes
have been well-cleaned already, you should really be scrubbing them thoroughly with a
vegetable brush and some warm water before you actually start cooking or cutting into them.
Even if you're not planning on eating the skin of your sweet potato, it's a good idea to give
them a good cleaning before you peel them, since dirt and debris from the skin could come into
contact with the flesh of your sweet potato during the peeling and/or cutting process.
Sweet potatoes are an extremely hardy and durable vegetable; as a result,
it takes a really long time for them to go bad. Under just the right conditions,
root vegetables can last notoriously long, and sweet potatoes are no exception — but
it's important to note that the right conditions are necessary. Sweet potatoes need to be in a dry,
somewhat cool environment — room temperature is perfect for these vegetables.
Basements and cellars are ideal, but your kitchen pantry is likely a good spot for them, as well.
The fridge? Not so much. According to the North Carolina Sweet Potato Commission,
putting sweet potatoes in the fridge can yield a hard center — and may negatively affect the taste.
Additionally, you may find that refrigerated sweet potatoes get a bit dry and shriveled.
Unlike other root vegetables that can last an entire season or more,
sweet potatoes will only last you around a month in the pantry. Still,
that's a much longer shelf life than most other non-root vegetables.
From your traditional orange sweet potatoes to speckled white and purple ones,
there are a lot of sweet potato varieties to choose from. And just like you might
find that Yukon gold potatoes are better for mashed potatoes than, say, Russet potatoes,
there's a right way to use the different kinds of sweet potatoes you'll find on the market.
According to the Huffington Post, there are two main types of sweet potatoes grown and sold in
North America: one with golden skin and white flesh, and another with copper skin and orange
flesh, the latter being the one you probably envision when you think about sweet potatoes.
But on top of those two predominant sweet potatoes, you'll also find plenty of other types,
such as Japanese purple sweet potatoes and Hayman sweet potatoes, which have a yellow-green flesh.
Now, they all have the same basic flavor — but they can have vastly different structural
characteristics, meaning that they'll each hold up to different cooking methods differently. White
variants tend to have a texture that's sort of in between the firm Russet potato and the
creamy orange sweet potatoes — as a result, they crisp up much better than orange variants and are
great for making sweet potato fries. On the other hand, if you're making a sweet potato casserole,
the orange variants should be your go-to, as they have a richer and creamier consistency.
Sweet potatoes are great any time of the day — whether it's a sweet potato hash at breakfast
time or roasted sweet potatoes at dinner, they're bound to make an incredible meal if you cook them
right. But if you're limiting yourself to savory preparations of the sweet potato, you're missing
out on so many amazing desserts that could be made with the starchy root vegetable — after all, it's
in the name that they're sweet, so why not use that sugary, saccharine quality to your advantage?
We're not just talking sweet potato casserole either — yes, sweet potato casserole can be a
delicious treat at Thanksgiving dinner, but there are also a huge number of more refined
and nuanced sweet potato-based desserts that deserve more widespread appreciation.
From the classic sweet potato pie to more off-the-wall recipes like sweet potato brownies,
there are so many different ways to incorporate sweet potato into your dessert repertoire.
Since sweet potatoes are naturally quite sweet, they allow you to cut down the
sugar content in your homemade desserts a bit while also adding a more complex,
almost caramel-like sweetness that refined sugars just don't have.
When you're making roasted sweet potatoes, you want to be careful about the amount of
oil you're using to coat the potatoes. For the most part, less is better — olive oil
adds a nice rich quality to the potatoes, but adding too much can make them soggy
and will prevent them from crisping up quite right. You can even get away with
not using oil at all, especially if you're roasting a sweet potato whole.
With roasted sweet potatoes that have been cut into pieces, the oil is more about adding
flavor to the potato — using a neutral oil for roasted sweet potatoes is fine,
but to really maximize the flavor of your sweet potato, use one of your
favorite olive oils or even a little bit of melted butter to boost the "wow" factor.
The oil helps them stay moist while allowing them to crisp up on the outside,
and really ups the richness of the whole dish — add too much though,
and you'll have a greasy, unpleasant mess on your plate.
If you're new to roasting sweet potato, stick to around one tablespoon of oil
for one large sweet potato — you can always adjust and add a bit more for taste later,
but you can't really reverse the effects of adding too much oil to the roasting pan.
Sweet potato casserole is a bizarrely unique American dish
that's become a Thanksgiving staple for so many families.
Quartz reported in 2018:
"[It's a] highly divisive concoction [that] appears on Americans' dining
room tables for its annual cameo, to the delight of some and the disgust of others."
While sweet potatoes and marshmallows are just a really odd pairing,
it's also probable that home chefs are simply making their sweet potato casserole a little
bit too sweet. If you're adding heaps of sugar to your sweet potato casserole,
you may be overdoing it. Sweet potatoes are naturally sweet, so you shouldn't be adding
huge amounts of sugar to your casserole, otherwise the sweetness gets a little crazy.
"Organic sweet potatoes. And I put 'em in the pressure cooker and I just,
you know, let them absorb their own natural sweetness."
Since sweet potatoes have a nice, rich sweetness that's much more subtle and nuanced than sugar,
adding lots more in the casserole will overpower that distinctive
natural sweetness and dumb down the complex flavors of the dish.
When it comes to eating sweet potatoes, it's no secret that the sweet, velvety interior is
the main attraction. But that doesn't mean you should do away with the skins entirely.
Certain preparations of sweet potato will call for peeling them, but there are plenty of other
times where keeping the skin attached to the flesh will actually enhance the
flavor and texture of your meal, while also providing a number of beneficial nutrients.
On the whole, unpeeled fruits and vegetables tend to have more vitamins, antioxidants,
and fiber than their peeled counterparts — this is certainly true of sweet potatoes.
Leaving the skins on will significantly increase the fiber content of your sweet potato,
as well as supplying you with plenty of valuable minerals like potassium and
magnesium — all of these are present in the flesh as well, but in marginal proportions.
Livestrong says an unpeeled sweet potato contains around 475 milligrams potassium per 100 grams;
peeled sweet potatoes only have about 230 milligrams per 100 grams,
meaning that more than half the potassium is located in the skin. If you're eating sweet
potato for their nutritional value, tossing out the skins is one of the biggest mistakes
you can make, as a peeled sweet potato simply lacks the nutritional value of an unpeeled one.
For the most part, boiling your vegetables is one of the worst
ways to cook them if you're trying to maximize the nutritional content. Plus,
it leaves you with bland and mushy veggies, no matter the vegetable you're boiling.
The same goes for sweet potatoes — when you boil or steam them, the water leaches out
the nutrients present in the vegetables, which diminishes their nutritional value significantly,
unless you're using the water you cooked them in for stock or stew. If you want to get the
most bang for your buck nutrition-wise, it's recommended that you roast your sweet potatoes
with their skins on and wrapped in foil so as to minimize nutrient loss during the cooking process.
As with any food item that you buy from your local supermarket or farmers market,
you'll want to carefully observe your sweet potatoes before plopping
them into your shopping basket. While "ugly" sweet potatoes that are weirdly
gnarled and strangely shaped are alright to purchase, avoid buying any sweet potatoes
that appear to be bruised or have cuts and gouges that reveal some of the flesh.
Bruises and cuts can expose the flesh to bacteria which will speed up the process
of spoilage — chances are, if a sweet potato has any of these blemishes at the point of purchase,
they've already begun to go bad and will be even
more unsavory by the time you decide to actually cook them.
During the shipping process, some sweet potatoes are bound to get bruised or cut
up a bit — this is the nature of boxing and transporting produce, and there's not much
we can do about it. But for every damaged sweet potato in your grocery store, you should be able
to find plenty of unblemished and robust ones that are perfectly fresh and ready to cook up.
While sweet potatoes can last a long time, if they're not kept in the right conditions, they
can easily go bad — if you've had a sweet potato sitting in your kitchen for a week or two, you'll
want to keep an eye on it and make sure there aren't any signs of your tuber taking a dive.
Before cooking your sweet potato, always give it a thorough inspection to make
sure that it's as fresh as can be, so you don't have to worry about any of
the health risks associated with eating spoiled food. It may have been gorgeous
when you bought it — but like all fruits and veggies, they don't stay that way forever.
It's pretty easy to tell if your sweet potato has gone bad. For example, if the softness is
limited to one spot on the sweet potato, it may be tempting to cut off this region
of the potato and cook the rest, but you should really toss the whole thing into a compost bin,
as this means the flavor of the entire potato will be altered and it may not even be safe to eat.
Are you trying to eat healthier and thinking about ordering a side of sweet potato fries instead of
those good ol' regular french fries next time you go out to lunch? Not so fast. Sweet potatoes
have a reputation for being the healthier alternative to regular potatoes, when in
actuality, the health benefits of choosing sweet potatoes over regular ones are not all that huge.
While sweet potatoes are definitely a healthier option,
their nutritional content is only marginally better than white potatoes,
and the cooking method used can vastly affect the nutritional content of the veggies as well.
Sweet potatoes and potatoes have nearly identical caloric content,
as well as the same amount of protein, fat, and carbohydrates. Nutrient-wise, sweet potatoes
have a slight edge, but regular white potatoes actually have more potassium than sweet potatoes.
"Ross, can you pass me the yams."
"Sure. Oh, and Joey's got the mash potatoes if you want to exchange them."
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