Sweet potatoes. Yams. Different recipes call for different ones. All summer, I had my eye on a recipe, but could find only yams in the grocery store's produce section, no sweet potatoes. When I looked at cans, everything was labeled as BOTH. "CANNED SWEET POTATOES sliced yams". Buy a can of yams, and the ingredients list consists of "sweet potatoes, water, corn syrup".
Today I was looking for sweet potatoes, but found only yams in the produce area. Given that I'm making
a stew, I figured they'd work pretty interchangeably anyway, so I bought a fresh yam and a can of sweet potatoes (which I used maybe half of, since the syrup made them squishy and I know they won't hold up well in the stew).
But when I got home, I broke open the trusty ol' Good Housekeeping cooking bible (which I recently re-discovered tells you EVERYTHING EVER - including how to make an omelet correctly! and successfully! even *I* got it right that time!). Under the column for "Sweet Potatoes": "Yams are not botanically related to sweet potatoes, but in the United States, canned sweet potatoes are often labeled yams".
WHY. WHY?!?!! (...also, how on earth are they not related, they're so insanely similar it's ridiculous.) I'm so annoyed, because I know there's just enough difference that while in a stew it's all good, when I want candied sweet potatoes at Thanksgiving I do not want to use yams, and when I want yams in a curry I may well not want sweet potatoes. Talk about false advertising, all they're doing is perpetuating the very confusion they're probably trying to cater to.
Grr.
Labels: cooking
*Ananda Daydream * 5:55 PM *
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