If stored properly you can eat sweet potatoes all winter! The ideal storage temperature for sweet potatoes is 55-65°F. They can get chill injury with prolonged storage at temperatures below 55°F, so if you don’t have the perfect location to store them at their ideal temperature, it’s better to store them on the countertop in your kitchen instead of putting them in the refrigerator.
Sweet potatoes are very versatile in their use, which is a good thing since they will be a staple vegetable in our diets for the next 4-6 months! You can simply bake sweet potatoes whole until fork tender and eat the flesh right out of the skin. They are also delicious when cut into bite-sized pieces and roasted or cut them into wedges or thin slices and make roasted fries or chips. If you’re going to do this, it’s best to put the wedges or slices of sweet potatoes on a rack in a pan. This allows the air and heat from the oven to circulate on all sides of the sweet potato making it more crispy and less soggy. Sweet potatoes also make delicious, hearty soups, stews, and curries. They may be added to chili, shredded, and fried like hash browns, or just simply cook and mash or puree them.
Sweet potatoes can also be incorporated into sweet preparations. Sweet potato pie is a traditional way to incorporate sweet potatoes into dessert. You can also use sweet potatoes to make biscuits, rolls, quick breads, muffins, cookies, bars, cheesecake and more!
Sweet potatoes pair well with a wide variety of ingredients, which is part of what makes them so versatile in their uses. They pair very well with fall fruits such as apples, pears, citrus and pomegranates. They also pair well with other vegetables including a variety of root vegetables; greens such as escarole, radicchio & kale; Brussels sprouts and dried beans. They also go very well with coconut, ginger, chiles, butter, cream, maple, nuts of any kind and Bourbon.
Health & Nutrition: Sweet potatoes provide an excellent source of vitamin A (in the form of beta-carotene), a very good source of vitamin C and manganese, and a good source of copper, dietary fiber, vitamin B6, potassium and iron. They also contain high amounts of antioxidants.
Growing Information: It takes a lot to grow a tropical vegetable in a temperate climate! Sweet potatoes are started from slips, which are sprouts that grow off the sweet potatoes. We carefully plant the slips once the chance for frost has passed, usually around the end of May, as they will not tolerate frost. Once established, the plant sends out a huge mass of vines, making weed growth nearly impossible. Sweet potatoes have very few pests or disease; they just need water and warm soil. We grow our sweet potatoes on raised beds covered with black plastic to help trap heat and raise the soil temperature. When it’s time for harvest, we must move quickly. First, we mow off the thick mass of vines and then each plant must be cut by hand all the way down to the ground. Sweet potatoes are planted about eight inches apart and send up around four or five shoots per plant, so the guys spend a lot of time cutting away the vines. Then, a machine digs about two feet underground and gently pulls up the masses of tubers along a conveyer as the guys vigilantly take each potato and place it into crates, being careful not to break the skin of the potatoes, which are very delicate fresh out of the ground. After harvest is complete, they still have to go back and pick up all the plastic.
Additional Fun Facts: Straight out of the field, our sweet potatoes tasted pretty good, but not good enough to eat. That’s right, we have a rule around here that you don’t really eat sweet potatoes for at least two weeks after they are harvested. When they are first harvested the potatoes are starchy, not very sweet or tasty, and the skins are very tender requiring careful handling. Sweet potatoes aren’t truly sweet potatoes until we “cure them.” Curing is a process by which we hold the sweet potatoes at high heat and high humidity for 7-10 days, basically it’s kind of like a sauna for sweet potatoes! During this time the starches in the potatoes are converted to sugars and the skins become more stable for long term storage.
