Casseroles and pies. Slow cooked or air fried. Baked or ice cream. The sweet potato goes everywhere.
Consider this: it’s hard to keep track of sweet potatoes’ many names. In Puerto Rico, Columbia, and Brazil they’re batata; Japan calls them satsumaimo; Mexicans love el camote; and the French have patate douce. Israelis eat sweet potato latkes; Thais sip sweet potato soup; and Koreans adore sweet potato noodles. Americans love everything sweet potato – especially on Thanksgiving.
How did sweet potatoes become the sixth most important food crop in the world – whatever you call them?
Most assume that sweet potatoes are a relative of regular potatoes. Wrong. They belong to different botanical families. It’s like calling a best friend “bro” – you might love him but there’s no genetic connection.
According to CIP, the International Potato Center, the sweet potato is “a storage root” not related to the regular potato, which is a tuber (thickened stem).
Yams creep into this picture, too. You may think they’re a type of sweet potato. No deal. Sweet potatoes originated in South America. Yams, with their bark-like skin, came from Africa – even if your favorite grocery store likes to use the same name for both. Those roots never crossed. See real yams below.
