Red yams..??

I cut one giant garnet yam into steak fry size last night. coated with some herbed olive oil, and several shakes of parmesan, tossed, and convect-baked at 400 til tender inside and crispy outside. Great with hamburgers (veggie burgers) with carmelized onion, turkey bacon, lite bleu cheese, and BBQ sauce. Excellent dinner!

Jeeze, I always thought there were just sweet potatoes and yams, now I find out there are various colors of both. That's what I like about the folks at RVNET. About the time a person thinks he knows everything, he finds out how dumb he is. I'll tell you what, when I go to the produce market here I'll be looking for any variation of all.. Thanks...
Here's another thought. I notice the tags on the veggies or fruit have a four digit number. Another poster back awhile mentioned a number to look for when buying onions. For an educated buyer, is a number important? A snowbird potato farmer once told me to watch for a certain potato, maybe the one he grows. :) Is there any way to check what the number means? I'm mostly interested in sweet onions...Thanks

You're talking about red sweet potatoes versus the more yellow harder sweet potatoes.
The "red" sweet potatoes have more sugar and more flavor and are not as hard as the pale or yellow ones.
I don't raise them ,just eat them and have forgotten long ago what Dad told me about the technical stuff.

Im sorry, Garnet is what I've been buying. Dark reddish orange. Wonderful.

IMO I think that if I were to mix pototoes with yams, I would use the red ones.

I've been buying a variety called Ruby, i think. They are reddish orange, much darker than the regular yams. Lovely flavor.

coolbreeze01 wrote:
Sweet potatoes taste better than yams........

This is funny.. :).. My Mother always said don't buy sweet potatoes, they're too stringy and not as good as yams. So I always bought yams. We don't seem to have a choice in the markets here, I don't see sweet potatoes. Anyway, I don't care what they're called. Peeled, cut in half lengthways, boiled until almost done them simmered in a skillet with butter and lots of brown sugar, they all taste great.. :).. I will but the sweet spuds the first chance I get..

We used to prefer yams when we could get them, but I don't see them anymore. The reality is that I believe what was called yams were actually a variety of sweet potato. I was told many years ago by a produce professional that yams sold in the us were a sweeter variety of sweet potato. I always thought the darker potatoes were sweeter and I imagine that's just a variety trait.
When we were in AZ we bought white sweet potatoes and I thought they were good with a little less fiber being the difference.
It is no longer possible to get the best varieties of produce as a rule, instead the most productive are available. Tomatoes are probably the best example. Tomatoes in the big markets generally have a texture closer to an apple than a tomatoes so that they are tough enough to stand shipping.

Sweet pototoes are a member of the pototoe family. Yams are a member of the Morning Glory family. But in all truth few people know or can taste the difference so both are called by both names and few people know the difference. We always just eat the one thats easy to get.

I grew up in Tabor City, Columbus Co., NC. In the 50's we had the distinction of being the "Yam Capital" of the world.
There are hundreds of varieties of sweet potatoes ranging from white and mild to deep red and super sweet. Sweet Potatoes 101