They’re All Just Sweet Potatoes

The sweet potatoes in your local supermarket are not related to the regular white potato - and they also are unlikely to be yams.

Signs in produce sections often identify orange-fleshed tubers as yams, and the yellow or white varieties as sweet potatoes.

All of them, whether their flesh is orange, white, yellow or purple, are properly called sweet potatoes. True yams, rarely found in the United States, are long, odd-shaped tubers that have white flesh and hairy or scaly skins.

Louisiana growers began using the term “yam” on their sweet potatoes to differentiate their tubers from those grown in other Southern states.