Roasting sweet potatoes

 They are almost too pretty to eat!

Sweet potato tastings

 We've been doing some family sweet potato tastings now that the sweet potatoes have fully cured. If you'd like to do your own tastings, try our sweet potato sampler bag which includes at least 8 varieties. It's an easy way to explore the range of tastes, textures and colors sweet potatoes come in.

Small sweet potatoes

   Our normal way to cook sweet potatoes is to bake them directly on the oven racks.  The skin blisters just enough for easy peeling. 
  But this doesn't work so well for the smallest of the sweet potatoes; it is tricky to keep them from falling through the racks and their small size makes it hard not to overbake them. 
  So our favorite way to enjoy baby sweet potatoes is coat them with butter and salt and put them on a baking tray to roast.  We then eat them, skin and all.

Sweet potatoes

   Sweet potatoes drying in the sun after getting washed.

From the kitchen: baked sweet potatoes

  You can microwave a sweet potato, but it will taste a lot better if you bake it.  That's what a friend told us after we served him our baked sweet potatoes for dinner, and sent him home with some extra baked ones to eat later.
  I have multiple sweet potato cookbooks from the library right now, and after I try a few recipes from them, I'm pretty sure I'll hear what I always hear when I try a new sweet potato dish, "You can make that if you want, but they taste better if you just bake them."  Of course, I'm not including slicing potatoes into chips and deep frying them in lard.  And sweet potato pies are popular, too.  And everyone likes sweet potato biscuits every couple weeks, but our family can eat simple baked sweet potatoes multiple times per week and not grow tired, especially by rotating through the different varieties with all the different tastes, textures and colors.
  It doesn't seem quite right that such an easy preparation can be so good.  Just put the washed sweet potatoes directly on the oven rack and bake at 425 for about an hour.  That's it.

Sweet potato tasting

  We tasted and scored 24 different sweet potato varieties last week.  For individual photos of each variety, click here.

  The highest average scores went to two varieties that haven't been at the top before, one that's been good but not at the very top before, Kyushu 100, and another that we had just grown for the first time, Saffron.  Kyushu also received the most 1st place votes. 

Other 1st place votes this year went to Faux Beau, Red Japanese, and Kotobuki.  Tennessee Red had the third highest average score after Kyushu and Saffron.  As usual, Covington and the purple fleshed varieties scored at the bottom of our taste test.  Covington is the most common variety sold in supermarkets, and although there's nothing wrong with the taste, there are definitely better tasting varieties, and we really don't like the baby food texture of Covington as a baked potato.  We do like Covington for other uses, however, like deep frying for potato chips, but we only compared baked potatoes for our taste test.  The purple fleshed varieties might also be pretty good in other uses.  They're not especialy sweet, and maybe there's some bitterness to them, which at first we find off-putting, especially in a blind taste test where we're expecting an average sweet potato, but that slight bitterness or whatever that flavor is might actually be good in some things.  We're thinking it might be good in the sorts of savory dishes that sometimes include unsweetened cocoa, for example, like chile.  In any case, they add striking color.  Nancy Hall, which has been our overall favorite more years than any other variety, was good this year but not as outstanding as it usually is.

  Having done these annual sweet potato tests for about 15 years now, it's remarkable how much variation there can be from year to year.  Besides the varieties already mentioned, other varieties that scored well in this year's taste test included Gem, Kotobuki, Suwan, Porto Rico, White Bunch, Scott Orange, White Triumph, and Murasaki.  PI 267946, which was among our overall favorites last year, is a variety we've definitely been enjoying this winter, but for some reason it didn't score very high in this taste test.  And although Woksaken didn't score high, that may have more to do with it being unexpectedly different rather than it not being as good.  It has a very dry, almost flaky texture, rather like a baked russet Irish potato.

Sweet potato varieties