What is the diff between a sweet potatoe and a yam?!

I always thought they were the same thing. ?? Love sweet potatoes when they are fixed right and have the gooey stuff on top. Yum.

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I'm pretty sure they are the same things, I think Yam is an American term.

Sweet potatoe is absolutely fantastic, one of my favourates, plus it actually counts towards your 5-a-day unlike regular potatoes! delicious

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These are good examples of foods with the same name but meaning different things in different parts of the world. I see canned candied yams in the store from USA and discovered they are actually sweet potatoes, while a yam in Asia & Africa is very different.

Although both sweet potatoes & yams are tubers, anyone who has tasted both will not think there is any similarity. There's a variety of skin & flesh colors for both of them.

For sweet potatoes, orange & yellow flesh is very common and there's also Japanese sweet potatoes with purple skin & white flesh. They are very good roasted in their skins on the BBQ or oven, used to replace normal potatoes in recipes (I also use them in curries), used in various desserts, deep-fried as fritters etc. One of my favourites is Chinese sweet potato soup (a dessert of sweet potato chunks in a gingery sweet soup). The leaves are also eaten as a green vegetable.

For yams, a common variety is brown skin with white flesh that is speckled with purple. The flesh is much harder than sweet potatoes. There's an Asian version of candied yams where thin slices of yam are deep-fried and then coated with sugar. Some well-known Chinese dishes with yam include Hakka Abacus Beads (savoury dish of yam balls & other ingredients) and Teochew Au Nee (a decadent dessert of sweet yam paste with gingko nuts & pumpkin). There's also yam rice that's good with Teochew braised duck and steamed yam cake. There are lots of other uses, even in ice-cream.

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there both the same thing

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sweet potatoes are orange in color while yams are white and waxy!

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