My brother is hosting Thanksgiving this year.  My younger, bachelor, I don’t have a roasting pan, brother.  We’ve all flown in from other locales.  A shopping list was sent ahead of time.  

Upon arrival, we double checked for missing ingredients.  He nailed it, but was worried about one thing.

“Your list said sweet potatoes, but all they had were yams.”

And there it is.  The question that comes up every year but never gets answered.   Is there a difference between sweet potatoes and yams?  But there was no veggie blog last year.  This year, I knew I had to get to the bottom of it. 

It’s pretty simple really.  It’s all Louisiana’s fault.  And a guy named Dr. Julian C. Miller and his colleagues at Louisiana State University.  Louisiana happens to be a wonderful place for growing sweet potatoes; they have been grown there for nearly 200 years.  The state was so well suited to this crop, that the folks at the LSU Agriculture Research and Extension Center began studying the sweet potato in earnest.  In Chase, LA, there is a research station dedicated entirely to the sweet potato.

Now. Notice that I have been calling the tuber in question a sweet potato, not a yam.  That’s because everything you see in your grocery store, farmers’ market, or wherever, is a sweet potato, NOT a yam.  In the 1930s, Dr. Miller and colleagues hatched a marketing plan to set Louisiana’s sweet potatoes apart from East Coast sweet potatoes.  They called their crop Louisiana Yams. 

Gotta admit, it has a nice ring to it. 

Actual Yams (and they do exist) are grown in tropical and sub-tropical regions. I’ve seen a few comments on the web that they can be found at some ethnic markets.  Supposedly they’re bigger than sweet potatoes, and occasionally cut and sold in pieces.  There was an interesting article in the New York Times this week on our country’s ties to the African Yam.

To add to the confusion, there are many different varieties of sweet potatoes.  And they come in different colors. Cooks Illustrated, in their usual scientific way, compared seven different sweet potato varieties and documented their distinct tastes.  They also did a “Sweet Potato Primer” video, in which they compare dry sweet potatoes to moist sweet potatoes.  The lighter ones are the dry ones, and the orange one’s are the moist ones.  And they also feature the elusive Actual Yam.

Here’s my theory. Now that the “yam” is so engrained in our lexicon, growers tend to name the lighter ones sweet potatoes and the darker, oranger sweet potatoes, yams.

Like these. 

These are Red Garnet SWEET POTATOES.  But they’re labeled yams.  WRONG!

Here’s a side by side comparison of  the so-called “yam” and the sweet potato.  These are BOTH SWEET POTATOES, just two different varieties.

And here are orange sweet potatoes correctly labelled, from Sun Gold Farm. 

By the way, Beuaregard’s like these are the variety most commonly grown in Louisiana where they supply 30% of our nations sweet potato crop!

I’m making Candied Sweet Potato Casserole with Toasted Marshmallow Topping.   Are sweet potatoes on your Turkey Day table?  How are you cooking them?

And if  you’ve tried an ‘Actual Yam’ please share your experience!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Want more veggies?  The Weekly Veggie has a new veggie story every Thursday.  Last week’s veggie story is here: Portly Porcini

Did you see last week’s market photos?  Click here for Monday Dose of  Market: Cornucopia of Local, Part 1.  New photos every Monday.