What, if any is the difference between yams and sweet potatoes?!
What, if any is the difference between yams and sweet potatoes?
Answers:
Sweet Potatoes
Popular in the American South, these yellow or orange tubers are elongated with ends that taper to a point and are of two dominant types. The paler-skinned sweet potato has a thin, light yellow skin with pale yellow flesh which is not sweet and has a dry, crumbly texture similar to a white baking potato. The darker-skinned variety (which is most often called "yam" in error) has a thicker, dark orange to reddish skin with a vivid orange, sweet flesh and a moist texture.
Current popular sweet potato varieties include Goldrush, Georgia Red, Centennial, Puerto Rico, New Jersey, and Velvet.
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Yams
The true yam is the tuber of a tropical vine (Dioscorea batatas) and is not even distantly related to the sweet potato.
Slowly becoming more common in US markets, the yam is a popular vegetable in Latin American and Caribbean markets, with over 150 varieties available worldwide.
Generally sweeter than than the sweet potato, this tuber can grow over seven feet in length.
The word yam comes from African words njam, nyami, or djambi, meaning "to eat," and was first recorded in America in 1676.
The yam tuber has a brown or black skin which resembles the bark of a tree and off-white, purple or red flesh, depending on the variety. They are at home growing in tropical climates, primarily in South America, Africa, and the Caribbean.
Yams contain more natural sugar than sweet potatoes and have a higher moisture content. They are also marketed by their Spanish names, boniato and ?ame.
Source(s):
http://homecooking.about.com/od/howtocoo...
Yam (vegetable), the common name for members of genus Dioscorea native of Africa.
A colloquial name for the sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas), particularly in the United States
The sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas), commonly called a yam in parts of the United States (especially in the southern and western portions of the country; this terminology causes some confusion with true yams) is a crop plant whose large, starchy, sweet tasting tuberous roots are an important root vegetable. The young leaves and shoots are sometimes eaten as greens. The sweet potato is only distantly related to the potato (Solanum tuberosum). It is even more distantly related to the true yam (Dioscorea species) which is native to Africa and Asia.
Although yams and sweet potatoes are both angiosperms (flowering plants), they are not related botanically. Yams are a monocot (a plant having one embryonic seed leaf) and from the Dioscoreaceae or Yam family. Sweet Potatoes, often called ‘yams’, are a dicot (a plant having two embryonic seed leaves) and are from the Convolvulacea or morning glory family.
sweet potatoes are yellow and have a drier texture. Yams are orange and much moister.
But, sweet potatoes are much much better than yams!!!
sweet potatoes you put in the oven in foil and can eat it with butter and cinnamon. yams is not in the skin and can be cooked with marsmellow or put in pie
There is no difference different people use different names.