Sweet Potatoes or Yams – What’s the deal?

For the most part, humans don’t eat yams.  We eat sweet potatoes that we call yams.  True yams are starchy roots related to lilies.  We do not find them particularly yummy.  I’ve read several accounts of how we came call the sweet potato a yam, and none of them sounded definitive or authoritative.  Thus, I will not take up space recounting them here.

The Gardener brought in many pounds of sweet potatoes about a month ago.  They have since been cured and stashed in the pantry (the much touted cool, dry place) for winter storage.  Faithful readers of Save the Harvest will remember the particulars of sweet potato curing – a week or so in a warm humid place – to change the starches into sugars and enhancing flavors.  This year the warm and humid place was the small, downstairs bathroom.  A vaporizer and an electric space heater provided the necessary climate control.

The Harvest Manager’s role in this process was to sort the cured sweet potatoes, sending some to the stove, some to the pantry, and a few to the compost pile.

All things considered, it was a successful harvest.