Most vegetables labeled as a “yam” in US supermarkets are actually just a variety of sweet potato. Melissa's Top 8 Money-Saving Tips for Thanksgiving, 6 Healthy Vegetarian-Friendly Sides You’ll Want to Dig Into This Thanksgiving, This Is the Most Popular Sweet Potato Casserole Recipe on Pinterest, I Ate Sweet Potato Casserole for the First Time and Now I'm Obsessed. Firm sweet potatoes still remain firm and a little waxy after cooking, while the soft variety becomes creamy and fluffy. Depending on the variety, sweetpotato flesh can vary from white to orange and even purple. The takeaway: Know what kind of sweet potato you want for your recipe, and be alert to the yam/sweet potato labeling concept, but also use your eyes to look at the color of the skin and the flesh, if possible. QUIZ: Which Pumpkin Pie Should You Make for Thanksgiving? A guide to common supermarket sweet potato varieties to know and love. Yams are sweeter than the sweet potato, grow much larger and are also nutr… From shopping for a turkey to buying pies, Melissa d'Arabian, the host of Food Network's Ten Dollar Dinners, shares her top tips to save money this Thanksgiving. Language Questions

The flesh color varies from white or yellow to purple or pink in mature yams. “They are your grocery store potatoes,” she says. Or have a look at other similar queries in our random questions section. Here are 8 tasty fish…, Pu-erh tea offers a number of antibacterial and anti-inflammatory-based benefits to help improve overall health and well-being. Sweet potato — Firm sweet potato with golden skin and lighter flesh. She's a graduate of the French Culinary Institute and author of the cookbooks, The Probiotic Kitchen,

Yams can easily weigh up to 55 pounds — imagine trying to carry that home from the grocery store? Sweet potatoes are always sweet. Subscribe to our newsletter to get the latest recipes and tips! Food wars takes a look at two popular root vegetables, yam and sweet potatoes. The sweet potato is from the Convolvulaceae family; it is a dicot that is related to flowering morning glory plants. In former times, African slaves in the US called the ‘soft’ sweet potatoes ‘yams’ because they reminded them of the ‘true’ African yams. Since the “soft” sweet potatoes slightly resembled true yams, they picked up the name and became what you see labeled as “yams” in most U.S. grocery stores.

A sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) is a root vegetable belonging to the morning glory family and native to tropical regions of the Americas. There is limited evidence that yam extract may be a helpful remedy for some of the unpleasant symptoms of menopause. They are both tuberous root vegetables that come from a flowering plant, but they are not related and actually don’t even have a lot in common.

And in New Zealand, the oca is called a yam.

Boiling, rather than baking, frying or roasting, is linked to a lower GI (9). That's thanks to early 20th-century Southern farmers, who began using "yam" to refer to the newer, orange-fleshed varieties of sweet potatoes they were cultivating, as a way to differentiate their product from the white-fleshed sweet potatoes Americans were already familiar with. Hannahs are dense, firm, and creamy, and much less prone to becoming waterlogged than orange sweet potatoes. Purple yams are found in Japan, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines and are often used in desserts. Their long shelf life of 6 months allows them to be a dependable food source during times of poor farming—the yam is a much more difficult crop to harvest than the sweet potato.

Most likely, all yams and sweet potatoes that you use from the grocery store are sweet potatoes. When cooked, these sweet potatoes have a slight flakiness akin to a regular potato. A food has a low GI if it causes blood sugars to rise slowly, whereas a high GI food causes blood sugars to rise quickly. These are naturally occurring substances that are usually harmless. Compared to sweet potatoes, yams can grow very large.

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Simple tips for planning your Thanksgiving dinner. If you spend any time in Hawai'i, you'll find these sweet potatoes incorporated into some of the most delicious potato salads around, dressed generously with my favorite condiment: mayonnaise. They’re carried in more grocery stores these days, but your best chance of finding them is to look in international and specialty markets. They have a slight nuttiness, and take well to steaming or roasting in cubes alongside other root vegetables. Food Nework Kitchen's Holiday One-Offs, Candied Yam. [Photograph: Shutterstock] Even once baked, the Okinawa sweet potato retains its stunning purple color.

Dioscorea (family Dioscoreaceae), of which there are many species and varieties.

Let this not-at-all-exhaustive guide act as a doorway into the vast and incredible world of Ipomoea batatas (that's science for "sweet potatoes").

Sweet potatoes originated in North America, first joining market shelves alongside the white potato as far back as the late 1600s. When cooked, these sweet potatoes have a slight flakiness akin to a regular potato.