Produce

Sweet Potatoes

Sweet potatoes and regular white potatoes are botanically unrelated plants from entirely different families, despite sharing the "potato" name and broadly similar pantry storage needs.

Orange-fleshed sweet potatoes are the most common variety in US markets, though purple- and white-fleshed varieties exist too, differing in sweetness and texture as much as in color.

What's commonly called a "yam" in US grocery stores is almost always actually a sweet potato — true yams are a genuinely different tuber, starchier and less sweet, more common in African and Caribbean cooking than in typical US markets.

Despite the shared name, sweet potatoes aren't botanically related to potatoes at all — a sweet potato belongs to the morning glory family, while a true potato belongs to the nightshade family, making them no more closely related than two entirely different garden vegetables that simply happen to share a common English name.

What's commonly sold as a "yam" in most US grocery stores is almost always actually a sweet potato — true yams are a starchier, drier tuber native to Africa and parts of Asia and are rarely sold in mainstream American supermarkets — a labeling mix-up that traces back to Louisiana sweet potato growers in the 1930s and '40s marketing their moister, orange-fleshed variety as "yams" to distinguish it from the paler, drier sweet potato varieties more common at the time.

Candied sweet potatoes topped with marshmallows became a fixture of the American Thanksgiving table in large part due to early 20th-century marketing by marshmallow manufacturers, who promoted recipes pairing the two specifically to sell more marshmallows, a commercial origin behind what now reads as an old-fashioned holiday tradition.

Japanese sweet potatoes, with a purple or reddish skin and a paler, drier, notably sweeter flesh than the common orange-fleshed American variety, along with purple-fleshed Okinawan sweet potatoes (naturally rich in anthocyanins), show just how much variation exists across sweet potato varieties beyond the standard orange supermarket version.

A sweet potato's orange flesh comes from a high concentration of beta-carotene, the same plant compound the body converts into vitamin A, and it's genuinely one of the more concentrated dietary sources of that compound among common vegetables.

Sweet potato pie, spiced with cinnamon, nutmeg, and often a bit of vanilla in a single-crust pastry shell, is a defining dessert of Southern US and African American holiday cooking, distinct from pumpkin pie despite the two being frequently confused or treated as interchangeable by people outside that tradition.

Sweet potato leaves, the vine's green tops rather than the tuber itself, are a commonly eaten vegetable in parts of East and Southeast Asia and West Africa, typically stir-fried or added to soup, a use that's far less familiar in the US, where the plant is grown almost exclusively for its root.

North Carolina grows more sweet potatoes than any other US state by a wide margin, a dominance built on the region's sandy, well-drained soil, which suits the crop's need to develop long, unobstructed tuber roots better than a heavier clay soil found in many other growing regions.