Sweet Potatoes - The Taste Test

Sweet Potato

This post is dedicated to one of my favorite foods, the large starchy sweet-tasting tuberous root vegetable known as the sweet potato.  Always fond of a good sweet, I decided to conduct a taste test.  I baked four different varieties of sweet potato, if anybody knows of other varieties I will gladly taste test them too, pictured above, which I got from one of my favorite local growers at the farmer's market.

Sweet Potato - Four Varieties

The sweet potato, believed to have originated somewhere in South or Central America, is a member of the same plant family as the morning glory flower.  The orange fleshed variety, often mislabeled as a yam, is actually a sweet potato and not a true yam at all.

The garnet or jewel variety of sweet potato, pictured above in the right hand corner, a good source of complex carbohydrate, beta-carotene, vitamin C, and Vitamin B-6, has beautiful coppery-red skin and brilliant orange flesh.  The flesh of the orange sweet potato is moist, almost sticky, and deliciously sweet.

The yellow sweet potato, pictured on the top left corner, has light brown skin and yellow flesh.  The flavor is delicate, mild, and pleasantly sweet.

The dazzling purple sweet potato, or Okinawan sweet potato, pictured above, is amazingly rich and sweet tasting.  The skin of the Okinawan is a light buff color and the flesh is truly a magnificent velvety, over-the-top purple.  The Okinawan is a great source of the antioxidant anthocyanine, don't try to say that one too fast, which is only present in red, blue, and purple food.

Other foods that are rich in anthocyanine are blueberry (my favorite berry!), elderberry (I am always on the look-out for them!), cranberry, billberry, raspberry, blackberry, blackcurrant (makes suburb jam!), cherry (another favorite!), chokecherry (my mother's favorite childhood jelly), eggplant peel, black rice (my favorite rice!), concord grapes (my favorite grapes!), muscadine grapes, purple cabbage, and violet petals (my favorite edible flower!).  Oh!  And red-fleshed peaches contain anthocyanine.  I just discovered that I am rather enthusiastic about anthocyanine containing foods!

Kindly, nature and agriculture have provided us with some additional and uncommon sources of anthocyanine containing foods such as the blue fleshed potato, purple broccoli, purple cauliflower, purple carrots, blue corn, and blood orange.  Love that color!

And finally, getting back to to our subject of the day, the Japanese sweet potato, pictured above on the bottom right, sometimes called Satsuma-imo, is a beautiful tuber, (does that sound oxymoronic?) with rose-violet skin and white flesh that deepens to a marbled translucence when baked.  It has a lovely sweet flavor that is especially appealing.

My current sweet potato preference, though subject to change when I get a random sweet potato that is so unexpectedly near perfection that it becomes the sweet potato of the moment, is Satsuma-imo, with Okinawan being a close second, followed by the vivid orange fleshed sweet potato, and finally, last but not least, the yellow fleshed sweet potato.

Though there are many, often elaborate, ways to prepare sweet potato I like mine simply prepared, either baked or roasted with butter.